The jumps that knocked Ilia Malinin off the podium
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
By ASHLEY CAI, WEIYI CAI, BORA ERDEN, LAZARO GAMIO, JERÉ LONGMAN, JOE WARD and JEREMY WHITE
What seemed inevitable for Ilia Malinin became inconceivable.
He was heavily favored last Friday to win the Olympic gold medal in men’s figure skating. His primary rival from Japan had just skated a shaky performance in the long program. He probably would not even need his signature quadruple axel to win easily.
And then Malinin, 21, imploded in a shocking collapse, succumbing to the enormous pressure of his first Winter Games and finishing an incomprehensible eighth after falling twice.
Malinin is the greatest figure skater of his generation, but even the best Olympic athletes can succumb to pressure or a loss of assurance — Mikaela Shiffrin struggling with a mental block in the slalom, Simone Biles losing her positioning in the air in gymnastics. Still, Friday ranked as one of the most unexpected breakdowns in international sports since Germany humiliated host Brazil, 7-1, at the 2014 soccer World Cup.
The eventual figure skating champion, Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan (291.58 points), put his hands over his mouth in disbelief when he realized he had won the gold medal, climbing from fifth place after the short program to the overall champion. He is the former Soviet republic’s first Olympic figure skating champion and only its second gold medalist in any sport at the Winter Games since the country first competed as an independent nation in 1994.
Malinin, nicknamed the Quad God, fell from first place after the short program to eighth place overall with 264.49 points — more than 69 points lower than his personal-best competition score of 333.81.
Heading into the free skate, the only real anticipation was whether he would become the first person to land a quad axel in the Olympics. Only Malinin has completed the jump in any competition. It involves a forward takeoff and thus requires 4 1/2 revolutions in the air.
After other competitors had stumbled, it seemed that Malinin could win with restraint, quite likely needing only three or four clean quad jumps to win a second gold medal at these Milan Cortina Games after the United States took first in the team competition.
But Malinin, a native of Virginia, was not at his best during these Olympics. He seemed vulnerable, somewhat overwhelmed by the scale of the moment.
His free skate started assuredly enough as Malinin landed a quad flip and received a nearly perfect score of 15.84 points. Next came the axel. He appeared to be attempting the unprecedented quad, the NBC commentator Johnny Weir said on air, but instead Malinin popped the jump, and it became a single axel. A quad axel has a base score of 12.50 points, with an additional 5 points possible with an impeccable degree of execution, but Malinin received little more than a point for the aborted effort.
He landed a quad lutz, the second most difficult four-revolution jump, but downgraded a quad loop to a double loop and then fell on a second quad lutz. He then landed a quad toe loop but dropped to the ice again on an attempted quad salchow.
He lost almost 72 points on those unexpected jumping mistakes, Tara Lipinski, the stunned commentator and 1998 Olympic women’s champion, said on air.
“I was not expecting that,” Malinin said to NBC. “I felt like going into this competition I was so ready. But I think, maybe, I was too confident that it was going to go well.”