MILAN — Ilia Malinin wound his way through the tunnels beneath the Milano Ice Skating Arena on Friday night, trying in vain to explain — or even just understand — exactly went wrong in an Olympic free skate that could only be described as a disaster.
In the arena, Mikhail Shaidorov was taking a victory lap wearing the gold medal everyone expected the American to win.
Meanwhile, Coldplay’s song “Viva La Vida,” and the lyrics that begin, “I used to rule the world …” played over the loudspeakers.
In one of the biggest upsets in figure skating history, Malinin fell twice and made several other glaring mistakes, sending the “Quad God” tumbling all the way off the podium and leaving a star-studded crowd in stunned silence. And that cleared the way for Shaidorov, the mercurial but talented jumping dynamo from Kazakhstan, to claim the first gold medal for his nation at these Winter Games.
“Honestly, I still haven’t been able to process what just happened,” Malinin said. “I mean, going into this competition, I felt really good this whole day. Feeling really solid. I just thought that all I needed to do was trust the process that I’ve always been doing.
“But it’s not like any other competition. It’s the Olympics, and I think people [don’t] realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen from the inside. So it was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like just I had no control.”
Out of control is a good way to summarize the performance.
The 21-year-old Shaidorov finished with a career-best 291.58 points, while Yuma Kagiyama earned his second consecutive Olympic silver medal, and Japanese teammate Shun Sato took bronze.
Then there was Malinin, also 21, who dropped all the way to eighth. The two-time world champion finished with 264.49 points, his worst total score in nearly four years and one that ended a two-plus year unbeaten streak covering 14 competitions.
“Honestly, yeah, I was not expecting that,” Malinin said. “I felt, going into this competition, I was so ready. I just felt ready going on that ice. I think maybe that might have been the reason, is I was too confident it was going to go well.”
Much of Malinin’ journey during the Milan Cortina Games had felt a little bit off.
He was beaten by Kagiyama in the short program of the team event, later acknowledging for the first time the pressure of winning at the Olympics was starting to get to him. And he still wasn’t quite his dominant self in the team free skate, even though a head-to-head win over Sato was enough to clinch the second consecutive gold medal for the American squad.
But by the time of his individual short program Tuesday night, Malinin’s fearless swagger and unrivaled spunk seemed to be back. He took a five-point lead over Kagiyama and Adam Siao Him Fa of France that seemed insurmountable entering Friday night.
“Going into the competition,” Malinin said, “I felt like this is what I wanted to do, this is what we planned, this is what I practiced, and really just needed to go out there and do what I always do. That did not happen, and I don’t know why. ”
Malinin had decided to practice early in the day at U.S. Figure Skating’s alternate training base in Bergamo, just outside of Milan, and that gave him a brief reprieve from the pressure of the Olympic bubble. And he was the essence of calm throughout his warmup, never once falling in all of his practice jumps while wearing his familiar glittering black-and-gold ensemble.
Then came the performance that could haunt Malinin for the rest of his career.
As the atmospheric music with his own voice-over began, he opened with a quad flip, one of a record-tying seven quads in his planned program. Then he appeared to be going after the quad Axel that only he has ever landed in competition and had to bail out of it.
Malinin recovered to land his quad Lutz before his problems really began.
He only doubled a planned quad loop, throwing his timing off. He fell on a quad Lutz, preventing him from doing the second half of the quad Lutz-triple toe loop combination. And in his final jumping pass, which was supposed to be a high-scoring quad Salchow-triple Axel combination, Malinin only could muster a double Salchow — and he fell on that.
“He never messes up,” Italy’s Daniel Grassl said, “so, obviously, we’re all a little surprised by how it went.”
By the time the music stopped, Malinin was left trying to mask his sorrow for a crowd that included Nathan Chen, the 2022 Olympic champion, along with seven-time Olympic gold medal gymnast Simone Biles, actor Jeff Goldblum, and his wife, Emilie.
“I knew that I could not have necessarily a perfect program and still manage to have a good skate. But just really, something felt off,” Malinin said, “and I don’t know what it was, specifically. I’m still trying to understand what that was.”
Shaidorov seemed just as shocked as everyone as the realization hit that he had won the gold medal.
He was only in sixth after the short program and an afterthought as the night began. But the world silver medalist, known for high-flying jumps but maddening inconsistency, delivered the performance of his life, landing five quads in a technically flawless program.
“It was my goal,” Shaidorov said simply, when asked about the gold medal. “It’s why I wake up and go to training. That’s it.”
