MILAN (AP) — Ilia Malinin made her way through the tunnels beneath Milan’s speed skating arena Friday evening, trying in vain to explain — or even understand — what exactly went wrong in an Olympic free skate that could only be described as a disaster.
In the arena, Mikhail Shaidorov took a victory lap with the gold medal that everyone expected the American to win.
And from the speakers comes the song ‘Viva La Vida’ by Coldplay and the lyrics that start with ‘I used to rule the world…’
In one of the biggest upsets in figure skating history, Malinin fell twice and made several more glaring mistakes, sending the ‘Quad God’ tumbling off the stage entirely and leaving a star-studded crowd in stunned silence. And that paved the way for Shaidorov, the erratic but talented show jumping dynamo from Kazakhstan, to claim his country’s first gold medal at these Winter Games.
“Honestly, I still can’t process what just happened,” Malinin said. “I mean, when I entered this competition, I felt really good all day. I felt really solid. I thought all I had to do was trust the process that I’ve always done.”
“But it’s not like any other competition. It’s the Olympics,” he added, “and I think people (don’t) realize the pressure and the nerves that are actually happening from within. So it was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like I had no control.”
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Out of control is a good way to summarize 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 place. The two-time world champion finished with 264.49 points, his worst overall score in almost four years, and a score that ended an unbeaten run of more than two years across fourteen full competitions.
“Honestly, yes, I didn’t expect that,” Malinin said. “I felt like I was so ready to get into this game. I just felt ready to get on the ice. I think that might have been why, because I was too confident that it would go well.”
Much of Malinin’s journey at the Milan Cortina Games felt a little strange.
He was defeated by Kagiyama in the short program of the team event, and later admitted for the first time that the pressure to win 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 U.S. squad’s second consecutive gold medal.
But by the time he made his individual short program Tuesday night, Malinin’s fearless swagger and unparalleled grit seemed to be back. He took a five-point lead over Kagiyama and Adam Siao Him Fa of France, which looked insurmountable on Friday evening.
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“When I entered 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 basically I just had to go out and do what I always did. That didn’t happen, and I don’t know why.”
Malinin had decided to practice early in the day at US Figure Skating’s alternative training base in Bergamo, just outside Milan, and that gave him a brief relief from the pressure of the Olympic bubble. And he was the essence of calm during his warm-up, never falling during all his practice jumps while wearing his familiar glittering black and gold ensemble.
Then came the performance that might haunt Malinin for the rest of his career.
When the atmospheric music with his own voice-over started, he opened with a quad flip, one of seven record-breaking quads in his planned program. Then he seemed to go after the quad axel that was the only one he had ever landed in the competition and had to pop out.
Malinin recovered and landed his quad lutz before his troubles really started.
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He only doubled a planned quad run, which messed up his timing. He fell on a quad lutz, which prevented him from performing 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 could only muster a double salchow – and on that he fell.
“He never makes a mistake,” said Italy’s Daniel Grassl, “so obviously we’re all a little surprised by how it went.”
By the time the music stopped, Malinin tried to mask his sadness in front of 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 I couldn’t necessarily have a perfect program and still have a good skate. But something really didn’t feel right,” Malinin said, “and I don’t know exactly what it was. I’m still trying to understand what that was.”
Shaidorov seemed as shocked as anyone when the realization hit that he had won the gold medal.
He was only sixth after the short program and an afterthought when the evening started. But the world silver medalist, known for his high-flying jumps but maddening inconsistency, delivered the performance of a lifetime, landing five quads in a technically flawless program.
“It was my goal,” Shaidorov said simply when asked about the gold medal. “That’s why I wake up and work out. That’s it.”
