Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
MILAN — Ilia Malinin need only to have looked into the stands on Friday night, where Nathan Chen watched as the American figure skating sensation known as the "Quad god" fell apart in his Olympic free skate, for inspiration about what might come next.
The overwhelming favorite to win gold, Malinin fell twice amid a calamitous program that he seemingly had perfected over the past year, sending him tumbling from first place all the way off the podium and allowing Mikhail Shaidorov to claim gold instead.
It bore an eerie resemblance to the scene that unfolded at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
Chen, who like Malinin had been groomed by Hall of Fame coach Rafael Arutyunyan, was considered the favorite along with Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu to stand atop the podium in South Korea. Instead, Chen fell once during his short program and struggled through the rest of it, leaving him so far behind that not even his winning free skate could earn him a medal.
One month later, he won his first world title. Four years later, Chen won Olympic gold in Beijing.
"I can't go back and change it, even though I would love to," Malinin said, candidly. "You have to take what happened or what you've learned from this and really just change or decide what you want to do for the future, and how to approach things."
What made the 21-year-old Malinin's fall so stunning was not just that he has been the dominant skater of his generation, building an unbeaten streak stretching back more than two years and claiming the past two world championships with relative ease.
It's that everything was setting up perfectly for him.
One by one, the skaters before him Friday night had problems of their own, falling on ice shared by speedskating that some lamented was not the best of surfaces. Italy's Daniel Grassl crashed out of podium contention, as did Adam Siao Him Fa of France.
Shaidorov was the only one who managed a memorable performance, and he had started the night in sixth place.
So Malinin, whose free skate clinched team gold for the Americans on Sunday, headed out one more time with a big buffer between him and the competition. He need only have put together a dialed-back version of the hardest planned program of anyone — as he did at the U.S. championships last month — to win his second gold medal of the Milan Cortina Games.
"That first quad and several of the quads, they felt really ideal," Malinin said. "I was prepared well enough."
Yet the problems began after he landed a quad lutz. Malinin doubled up a planned quad loop, fell on another quad lutz — preventing him from doing the second half of a combination sequence — and made a mess of his final jumping pass. What was supposed to be a high-scoring quad salchow-triple axel became only a pedestrian double salchow, and Malinin even fell on that.
"It's really difficult when everyone assumes that he will get gold. There's this pressure," said Japan's Yuma Kagiyama, the last man to have beaten Malinin way back in 2023, and the men's silver medalist for the second consecutive Winter Games.
"His performance, if I may comment, was a little bit unusual. But it really proves that this is the Olympics. Things can happen."
Malinin acknowledged the pressure had gotten to him during a relatively poor short program in the team event. And he still seemed to be a little off in the free skate the following night, even though it was enough to give him at least one gold medal from Milan.
"We saw that even he is human," Grassl said, "and these things can happen to anyone."
Malinin was nothing if not noble in defeat.
He gave Shaidorov a hug as he walked out of the arena, whispering in his ear, "You deserve it." Then he answered the same question, over and over, for dozens of TV crews and reporters from all over the world: What just happened?
"It's almost like I wasn't aware of where I was in the program," Malinin said. "Usually I have more time and more feeling of how it is, but this time, it all went by so fast, and I really didn't have time to make those changes or make that process different."
"I was really confident, just feeling really good about it," he said, "and then it's like it's right there, and it just left your hands."
The end of one disastrous free skate will hardly be the end for Malinin, though. He's still the reigning world champion, the best figure skater of his generation, and again the overwhelming favorite to win Olympic gold four years from now in France.
"The pressure of the Olympics really gets you. People say there's an Olympic curse, that the Olympic gold medal favorite is always going to skate bad at the Olympics," he said. "It's really not easy, but I'm still proud of being able to get to the finish."
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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
