MILAN — The figure skating community described the shock they felt watching Ilia Malinin’s mistake-ridden performance Friday night, trying to help fans understand how the sport’s most dominant athlete performed so far below expectations.
Entering the Milan Cortina Olympics as the heavy gold medal favorite, Malinin stumbled multiple times during his routine and lost 72 points to deductions as he fell from first to eighth place. The self-proclaimed “Quad God” also failed to perform his signature quadruple axel jump and he fell after attempting a quadruple lutz.
“I’m in shock,” NBC Sports Olympic correspondent and 1984 gold medalist Scott Hamilton said on Friday. “There was no way he could lose. And not only no way he could lose, no way he wasn’t going to win by 30. With his body of work and everything we’ve seen coming into this event, he’s unbeatable. I got asked, ‘Is anyone able to beat Ilia Malinin?’ and I said, ‘Only Ilia.’ And that happened tonight.”
Nathan Chen, who won a gold medal in the men’s single skating event in 2022, empathized with Malinin. At the 2018 Olympics, Chen struggled during his short program in both team and individual competition after entering with high expectations.
“I can definitely reflect back on my experience in 2018 when I went into the short program with a lot of pressure, a lot of concerns, a lot of doubt,” Chen said in a video for Yahoo Sports. “[Malinin] went into his quad axle and singled and so you could see that every single element he started holding back a little bit more. … and by the end of it, just was not his night.”
After his struggles, Malinin admitted the pressure of the moment affected him, saying after the result, “All of this pressure, all of the media, and just being the Olympic gold hopeful was a lot. It was too much to handle.”
Chen said the experience of skating in the Olympics is more difficult than other competitions.
“One of the hardest parts about performing for a huge sold-out crowd is you can viscerally feel the reaction from the crowd,” Chen said. “I remember when I went for my first jump and I fell, the whole crowd went, ‘ooh.’ That just hurts you to your gut. Mentally, you have to refresh, you have to figure out what went wrong, but also the energy just changes in the arena, you can feel there’s tension now.”
There was certainly tension early in Malinin’s free skate, when he seemed primed to attempt a quadruple axel and ultimately settled for a single, a jump that drew an audible reaction from the crowd.
Malinin’s issues also appeared to be mental to NBC Sports analyst and 1998 Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski.
“I don’t think we can even point to anything that truly happened technically,” Lipinski said on NBC on Friday night. “It was all mental. I never thought that he could be off the podium.”
Malinin, 21, was expected to dominate the Olympics as he’s run away with most international competitions over the last few years and hadn’t lost since 2023.
After not being selected for the United States team for the 2022 Games in Beijing, Malinin has won the last two World Championships, three straight Grand Prix finals and three straight U.S. Championships, often with huge leads over second place.
“Every little skater, every little athlete in any sport that’s in the Olympic Games, across summer and winter, you dream about that moment in front of the entire world,” NBC Sports’ Johnny Weir said Friday. “And when you get there, it’s of course a huge and monumental achievement, but then you’re there and this is what it feels like.
“You’re all of a sudden thrust in front of the entire world instead of just your niche sport. It gets so huge, and everything you’ve ever dreamt about, everything that you’ve ever bled, sweated, or cried for comes down to — in our sport — six minutes in front of the world. And that pressure is a lot to handle.”
