MILAN — It was set to be a coronation inside Milano Ice Skating Arena. The American prodigy, the “Quad God” Ilia Malinin was going to take his place in figure skating lore and become the 2026 Winter Olympic champion.
He felt good throughout Friday, Feb. 13. He figured all he needed to was just trust the process he had gone through for the past two years of his dominant run. He has trained and practiced his whole life for this moment.
All was well — until it was time to take the ice.
Before he stepped out into a full arena, eager to celebrate an historic achievement, he knew something was wrong, and it planted the first seeds of a disastrous night.
“Going into that starting post,” Malinin said. “I just felt like all the just traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head. There’s just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there.
‘I just did not handle it.’
It was a stunner in the men’s singles free skate, as not only did the 21-year-old U.S. star not win gold, but he didn’t even reach the podium, finishing in eighth place, the worst competition result of his senior career since March 2022.
There are so many questions as to what happened. After the short program, Malinin set himself up for another victory. After so many other skaters before him struggled, it was as if the gold medal was being handed to him on a golden platter.
Even though he had a bad feeling, immediately after the program he was still trying to understand how everything unraveled.
‘I still haven’t been able to process what just happened,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot of mixed emotions.”
The first sign of trouble came on his planned quad Axel; his signature move, and one he had yet to do in Milano Cortina. He geared up for it — only to bail on it midair, resulting in just a single Axel.
Still, everything felt fine. Then there was the botched quad loop, scored as a double loop. The quad lutz? Also missed. Things just continued to unravel, and by the time he landed a backflip in the later part of his program, it didn’t matter. Gold, and an Olympic medal, just slipped through his hands.
For such a shocking result, everyone wants to know what happened. Given how so many skaters prior to Malinin kept falling, was there something up with the ice?
‘Maybe the ice was also not the best condition for what I would like to have,” Malinin said. ‘That’s something I cannot complain about, because we’re all put in that situation where we have to skate no matter what happens.’
Was this some sort of karma for him not making the 2022 Olympic team in Beijing?
‘I think if I went to ’22, then I would have had more experience and know how to handle this Olympic environment. But also, I don’t know what the next stages of my life would look like if I went there,’ Malinin said.
OK, so what was it?
If he had to pinpoint it, the pressure just got to him, at the worst possible time.
“People only realized the pressure and the nerves that actually happened from the inside. It was really just something that overwhelmed me,” he said. ‘I just felt like I had no control.’
You didn’t need to really know figure skating to know the expectations for Malinin. He was hyped up as the next great American athlete, a once-in-a-generation skater. All the build-up around the Winter Olympics was he didn’t just have a chance to win gold, he was going to win it. The only real question was if he was going to shatter Nathan Chen’s Olympic and world record scores.
But then we were reminded: nothing is guaranteed in sports. When the lights are at its brightest, when the world is watching – and expecting – perfection, it can break you. Especially for someone that was just able to order alcohol in the U.S. two months ago, and still feels like a teenager.
‘It’s not easy,” he said. ‘Being the Olympic gold hopeful is really just a lot to deal with, especially for my age.”
There is no doubt this will be something that will sting for some time. It’s going to be something that will hover above his head, and something he will have to work to shake off for the next four years until the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps. Until then, people are going to remember what happened in 2026.
So where does the ‘Quad God’ go from here?
‘It wasn’t my best skate, and it was definitely something I wasn’t expecting, and it’s done,” he said. ‘I can’t go back and change it, even though I would love to do it. But from here, it’s just regrouping, figuring out what to do next.”
A devastating outcome that turned a coronation into a funeral.
‘I felt like this is what I wanted to do. This is what we plan. This is what I practice, and really just needed to go out there and just do what I always do,” he added. ‘That did not happen, and I don’t know why.”
