U.S. figure skater Ilia Malinin at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games.
Figure skater Ilia Malinin entered the 2026 Winter Olympics as the runaway favorite to win gold in the men’s individual competition.
After helping the U.S. win gold in the team figure skating event, scoring 200.03 points in his free skate to secure the team gold medal, a second gold medal seemed inevitable. He scored a 108.16 in the men’s individual short program — 5.09 points ahead of Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama in second place.
Barring catastrophe, Malinin would be standing on top of the Olympic medal platform following his free skate. However, a catastrophe happened. The 21-year-old fell twice, failed to perform his signature quad axel, and made several mistakes on his other jump combinations.
In a stunning turn of events, Malinin, who hasn’t lost a competition since 2024, finished in eighth place. Following his disastrous performance, the young superstar made no excuses.
“I blew it, that’s honestly the first thing that came to my mind was there’s no way that just happened,” he told reporters.
“The pressure of the Olympics really gets you. The pressure is unreal. It’s almost like I wasn’t aware of where I was in the program. Usually I have more time and more feeling of how it is, but this time, it all went by so fast… It just felt so overwhelming. I didn’t really know how to handle it in that moment.”
Following the worst skate of his professional life, no one would blame Malinin for taking some time for himself to regroup. However, the Fairfax, Virginia, native is doing the opposite.
USA Today’s Christine Brennan reported on February 15 that Malinin is scheduled to perform in the popular skating gala on Saturday. Malinin also decided to try to win his third straight world title and compete at the 2026 world championships next month in Prague.
Brennan wrote, “It is almost unheard of for an eighth-place skater in any of the four Olympic disciplines to be invited to skate in the closing gala, a show-style exhibition in which skaters are not judged and are simply performing for the audience. Usually only the Olympic medalists perform, with the occasional fourth-place finisher or skater from the host nation included.”
However, Malinin, known as the “Quad God,” is simply so popular and such a draw for the sport that they wanted to include him.
For a guy wearing a shirt with “Quad God” emblazoned on the front during warm ups, it wasn’t clear how the confident skater would handle such crushing defeat at the Olympics. However, the George Mason University student handled the heartbreaking situation with grace.
Malinin approached gold medalist Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan and congratulated him on his achievement. He also didn’t try to avoid his post-performance interviews, speaking calmly with NBC’s Andrea Joyce.
“I was not expecting that, I felt like going into this competition, I was so ready,” he told Joyce, “maybe I was too confident that it was going to go well. I think it was definitely mental, just now finally experiencing that Olympic atmosphere, it’s crazy, it’s not like any other competition, it’s really different.
“I’m still so grateful that I was able to put in this work and effort to get to where I am, but of course, that was not the skate that I wanted.”
