'Quad God' Ilia Malinin falls twice in a disastrous Olympic free skate

MILAN — Ilia Malinin, the American figure skating sensation known as the "Quad God," proved to be a mere mortal after all.

The 21-year-old from Northern Virginia fell twice during a disastrous free skate at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Friday night, sending him tumbling all the way off the podium and allowing Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan to claim a stunning gold medal.

"I blew it," Malinin said afterward, poised and magnanimous in defeat. "That's honestly the first thing that came to my mind."

Malinin led by a comfortable margin after the short program and merely had to deliver a mediocre performance Friday night to add individual gold to his team gold medal. Instead, the two-time reigning world champion was trying to hold back the tears after one of the worst nights of his career, one that left a star-packed crowd inside Milano Ice Arena sitting in stunned silence.

"Honestly, yeah, I was not expecting that," Malinin said. "I felt going into this competition I was so ready. I just felt ready going on that ice. I think maybe that might have been the reason, is I was too confident it was going to go well."

Shaidorov finished with a career-best 291.58 points to give his nation its first gold medal of the Winter Games, while Yuma Kagiyama earned his second consecutive Olympic silver medal and Japanese teammate Shun Sato took bronze.

Then there was Malinin, who dropped all the way to eighth place. He finished with 264.49 points, his worst total score in nearly four years, and one that ended a two-plus year unbeaten streak that covered 14 full competitions around the world.

"The nerves just went so overwhelming," Malinin said, "and especially going into that starting pose, I just felt like all the ... traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there's just like, so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there and I just did not handle it."

Much of Malinin's journey in the Milan Cortina Games had felt a little bit off.

He was beaten by Kagiyama in the short program of the team event, later acknowledging for the first time that the pressure of winning at the Olympics had started to get to him. And he still wasn't quite his dominant self despite a head-to-head win over Sato in the team free skate, which clinched the second consecutive gold medal for the Americans in the event.

But by the time of his individual short program Tuesday night, Malinin's fearless swagger and unrivaled spunk seemed to be back. He took a five-point lead over Kagiyama and Adam Siao Him Fa of France that seemed insurmountable going into Friday night.

Malinin had decided to practice early in the day at U.S. Figure Skating's alternate training base in Bergamo, just outside of Milan, allowing him to escape the Olympic bubble and avoid sitting in the arena all night. And he was the essence of calm throughout his warmup, never once falling in all of his practice jumps while wearing his familiar glittering black and gold ensemble.

Then came a performance that might well haunt Malinin for the rest of his career.

As the atmospheric music with his own voice-over began to play, he opened with a quad flip, one of a record-tying seven quads in his planned program, then appeared to be going after the quad axel only he has ever landed in competition and had to bail out of it.

Malinin recovered to land his quad lutz before his problems really began.

He only doubled a planned quad loop, throwing his timing off. He fell on a quad lutz, preventing him from doing the second half of the quad lutz-triple toe loop combination that would have earned him big points. And in his final jumping pass, which was supposed to be a high-scoring quad salchow-triple axel, Malinin only could muster a double salchow — and he fell on that.

By the time the music stopped, Malinin was left trying to mask his sorrow for 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've been through a lot," Malinin said. "Being the Olympic gold hopeful is really just a lot to deal with, especially for my age."

Shaidorov was just as shocked as everyone as the realization hit that he had won the gold medal.

He was only in sixth after the short program and an afterthought as the night began. But the 21-year-old known for high-flying jumps but maddening inconsistency delivered the performance of his life, landing five quads in a technically flawless program.

It seemed altogether fitting that Coldplay's song "Viva La Vida" played after the medal ceremony, as Shaidorov and his fellow medalists from Japan took a victory lap. "I used to rule the world," the lyrics begin.

"I went up to him and I congratulated him," Malinin said of the new Olympic champion, "because watching him skate — I watched him the locker room — I'm just so proud of him. I heard that he had not a great season."