I cannot believe my eyes. The “Quad God” has fallen to Earth. On Friday night, I witnessed the most spectacular meltdown of an Olympic favorite that I have ever seen.
After the short program, I told you that Ilia Malinin was unbeatable. And don’t worry, I’ll be wiping egg off my face for weeks and I’ve already ordered my dinner of humble pie and crow, which I’ll eat as soon as I’m able to remove my foot from my mouth. When I declared the 21-year-old American invincible, I wrote that I felt a bit like “a shipbuilder calling the Titanic unsinkable.” So put on your lifejackets and get to safety—I must go down with the ship I built.
I still say Ilia Malinin is unbeatable. It’s just that the skater I saw tonight was not Ilia Malinin. That was someone else entirely. Seeing Malinin finish in eighth place in the Olympics has put a white streak in my hair and made me question if there are any certainties in the world. Now, I’m not sure if I let go of this glass of water that gravity will bring it to the floor. But maybe gravity is still a certainty that we can count on, as it brought Malinin back to Earth again and again in Milan.
The closest comparison I can come up with to what I saw on Friday night is when the gymnastics GOAT Simone Biles got the “twisties” in Tokyo and withdrew from the team event, the mental pressure making her unable to complete moves that were previously easy for her to land. But that disorientation happened to her almost immediately, in her first Olympic event. At these Games, we had already seen Malinin throw down three programs, ranging from solid to incredible. After a commanding outing in the short program, all he needed was a middling performance in the free skate to secure Olympic gold. But even that proved to be too much.
Given the narrative that men’s figure skating was a one-man show, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that other skaters were going to take the ice as well. Allow me to spill some ink on their performances before I break down what exactly fell apart in Malinin’s free skate.
The men’s event features the most difficult jumps in figure skating. On a good night, you’re seeing thrilling, high-flying feats of excellence—almost an aerial battle. On the worst, it becomes a demolition derby, the winners being determined by who didn’t totally crash out. Friday’s free skate was unfortunately more the latter, as skater after skater turned in performances far below what they’re capable of.
Japan’s Shun Sato was a real surprise in the team event free skate, finishing only 5.17 points behind Malinin, just shy of bringing home team gold for Japan. In the individual event he skated to Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” which is a tall order for any skater; the music is so grand you risk being swallowed up by it. Compared to his outing earlier in the Games, this skate felt lacking in excitement and a little more clinical. I do, though, admire his clean, unadorned style, which harkens back to the skating of yesteryear, before the new judging system caused everyone to add too many flailing arms to their movements to rack up points. Sato completed three quadruple jumps, and despite one wonky landing on a triple lutz, it was overall a solid showing. When Malinin took the ice as the final skater, Sato was sitting in third place, his medal chances were next to zero. But when Malinin faltered later, he rose like a phoenix from the ashes: The firebird that is Shun Sato can now call himself the 2026 Olympic bronze medalist.
When Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov took the ice, no one in the arena thought that they were about to see the gold medal free skate. But without commentators like me filling their heads with false certainties, maybe they should have? Shaidorov is the reigning World Championships silver medalist after all. Then again, he did finish more than 30 points behind Malinin in that event, so the odds of an upset seemed slim to none.
Shaidorov’s first jumping pass was something remarkable—a triple axel into a quadruple salchow. In combinations and sequences, the first jump almost always has greater or equal rotations than the second, because it’s so much easier to build up speed going into that initial leap. Shaidorov reversed the formula here and did the harder jump second. It’s no wonder he’s the only person to ever complete this sequence.
His following quadruple lutz was a little wild but he held on. He then landed a quadruple lutz (the hardest quad beside Malinin’s fabled quadruple axel), which again required a bit of effort to land. But after that, the rest of his program went flawlessly, as he completed three more quads for a total of five in one program. In a pre-Malinin world we’d all have been jumping out of our seats. And I will say, my mouth fell open a couple times watching his jumps. At this point, I was confidently declaring, “This is the guy to watch for 2030.” Little did I know I should’ve subtracted four years from that prediction.
Is Shaidorov a perfect skater yet? Absolutely not. He has a long way to go with his presentation. I don’t know that he was fully able to connect with the emotion in the music he’d selected (the song “Confessa” performed by Kazakh singer Dimash, followed by a selection from the Fifth Element soundtrack). A couple times I wanted to yell at him, “Wake up! This is the Olympics!” But maybe he wasn’t asleep—he was just focused on completing his mission. And on this night, clean execution turned out to be enough for gold. When he finished his program, he collapsed to the ice in joy. It’s a beautiful gold medal moment in retrospect. When I replay Friday’s free skate, maybe I’ll stop watching after that part.
After Shaidorov, Italian Daniel Grassl performed a Conclave free skate that opened with the dialogue, “The pope is dead.” You haven’t seen that at the Olympics before. Grassl had some under-rotation issues on his quadruple jumps, and his music didn’t particularly suit his skating style, but it was a skate I’ll remember. I mean, he ripped open his cardinal costume like Superman to reveal papal vestments underneath. If that were in a Christopher Guest movie, I would say it was a bit much. But Italians have an internationally established right to be a little bit extra.
Next, Adam Siao Him Fa of France, skating a companion piece to his Vitruvian Man short program, interpreted The Creation of Adam in his free skate. Like Grassl before him, he had a costume reveal, transforming his top to reveal God’s hand touching Adam’s. I swear, one more reveal and this would’ve been a very special episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Siao Him Fa’s reputation for inconsistency proved true here, as he fell on his opening quadruple lutz and stepped out on the landing of a quadruple toe loop and a quadruple salchow. His axis of rotation sometimes goes so wildly off that I instinctively shout, “Oh no!” Despite a beautiful lyrical step sequence and a backflip (something he helped bring back to the sport), it was not enough for the podium.
The penultimate skater was reigning Olympic silver medalist Yuma Kagiyama. I thought going in that if Malinin stumbled, it would be Kagiyama who took him down. But the Japanese skater faltered right away, stepping out on the landing of his opening quad salchow and then falling on his quadruple flip. At that point I said out loud, “Ilia just won.” I suppose I’m addicted to tempting fate.
What I love about Kagiyama is that there’s an effervescent sparkle to his skating, a glint that would have paired well with his soaring Turandot music. But on this night he seemed to be locked in a state of fear. You could see his disappointment as he skated off the ice. When the scores came in, his face fell into his hands and coach Carolina Kostner patted him on the back. With Ilia about to win gold, Kagiyama’s free skate was only going to be enough for bronze. Unless …
Ilia Malinin seemed calm as he took center ice. He needed 183.42 points to win—14.36 points lower than his lowest-scoring free skate this season. The last time he scored below that number was September 2023. He had it in the bag. And then he very much didn’t.
Malinin’s free skate opened with his own voice speaking the phrase: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” God, how I wish I’d listened to those words before proclaiming him unbeatable. Does skating to your own voice feel a bit like hubris? Absolutely. But I honestly thought that Malinin, the best jumper of all time, could tempt fate and get away with it. And after he opened with a gorgeous quadruple flip, it seemed he was in the zone.
Next up, however, was the elusive quadruple axel, a jump never landed at the Olympics and never landed in international competition by anyone but Malinin himself. Malinin didn’t need this jump to win, so the question was whether he would attempt it. On Friday night, he seemed intent on going for it but bailed on his rotation, “popping” it, and completing only a single. He didn’t need that jump to win, though, and could afford a few more mistakes and comfortably win gold. He confidently hit a quadruple lutz next. Again, that’s the hardest quad besides the axel—it looked like he was back on track.
It all slipped away from there. He popped his quadruple loop, only completing a double. While not a fall, it was a 10-point mistake. He fell on his following quad lutz. The crowd roared to try to cheer him on, almost pitying him. He then nailed a quad toe, triple toe sequence only to fall on his succeeding quadruple salchow attempt, completing just two revolutions in the air.
By the time he successfully completed his zero-point backflip, a move that he adds only for flair, you could see defeat on his face. He went into the free skate as a lock for the gold medal. He finished well off the podium.
“I blew it,” Malinin said later. “That’s honestly the first thing that came to mind.”
That assessment is harsh but totally accurate. Yes, Malinin hit three quadruple jumps, but that program was an absolute disaster for a skater of his caliber. He left too many points on the table, more than 70 thrown away on jumping errors.
Afterwards, in the “kiss and cry” area, he indulged in a rare moment of excuse-making, saying, “If they’d sent me to Beijing, I wouldn’t have skated like that.” Malinin was referring to U.S. Figure Skating’s decision to leave him off the 2022 Olympic team despite his second-place finish at nationals at 17 years old. His implication was that if he’d lived through Olympic pressure four years ago, he wouldn’t have crumbled at the Milan Cortina Games.
That’s entirely plausible. But even with experience, the amount of pressure this man was under may still have been impossible to bear.
Going into the Olympics, I puzzled over how to write about Malinin given what I thought was his inevitability as a gold medalist. Can a narrative still be interesting when we know the fated end in advance? I thought of Greek drama, tales where the ending is foretold but are still captivating to watch play out. This was a tragedy alright, but perhaps one more akin to myth. The Quad God turned out to be more like Icarus, flying too close to the sun and being punished by the gods for his hubris.
But really, I’m getting too lofty here. Ilia Malinin is human, and he had a very bad day on the worst possible day to have one.
I can still remember my own worst skating performance. I had stepped on a bee in the grass the day before, and my foot got incredibly swollen. On competition day, it was still misshapen, but I strapped it into my skate because I am not a quitter. I fell three times and finished in last place. You know what I learned from that experience? Almost nothing of use. Just that life is cruel and bad things can happen at the worst possible moment. Not everything has a lesson.
Malinin’s future in figure skating will be determined by how he handles this failure. Will he be like Nathan Chen, who took his Olympic disappointment in 2018 and turned it into Olympic gold four years later? Or will he be like Yulia Lipnitskaya, the Olympic favorite in 2014 who, like Malinin, helped her country win team gold only to miss the podium entirely in her individual event? She went on to fade from the sport entirely.
Many of my all-time favorite skaters never achieved Olympic glory. Kurt Browning, a four-time world champion, never won an Olympic medal in his three Games. Michelle Kwan famously never won Olympic gold, but if you ask a random American on the street to name a figure skater, she’s still going to get a solid majority of the responses. The truth is, some Olympic champions get forgotten and some household names never become Olympic champions.
I hope for Malinin’s sake and for ours that he ultimately wins the individual gold medal that I believed would already be his. He’s already achieved technical feats that were previously deemed impossible. In 2030, with this experience behind him, perhaps he’ll rise to the occasion. And in four years, he might want to begin his free skate with a different axiom: “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”