Ilia Malinin struggled to find words for the figure skating upset that shocked the world Friday.
“I can’t process what just happened,” Malinin said just moments after an uncharacteristic skate that resulted in one of the biggest surprises of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The 21-year-old from Northern Virginia fell twice during a disastrous free skate on Friday night, sending him not only out of gold medal contention, but off the podium entirely. Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan went on to claim gold in a stunning finish.
“A reminder that nothing is certain in sports,” announcer Terry Gannon said.
A visibly emotional Malinin burst into tears as he ended his skate.
“I blew it,” Malinin said afterward, poised and magnanimous in defeat. “That’s honestly the first thing that came to my mind.”
So what happened?
“I was not expecting that,” Malinin, struggling to find the right words, said just moments after he left the ice. “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.”
U.S. figure skating star Ilia Malinin stumbled through uncharacteristic mistakes in the Olympic free skate. Mariah Bell breaks down what happened during the men’s free skate.
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.
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.
Malinin dropped to eighth place and 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.
Malinin had faced a noticeable amount of pressure during the Games and had earlier admitted he wasn’t skating like himself heading into the final event. Both of his skates in the team event were mediocre by only his lofty standards, but he felt much more comfortable during his short program, and it was reflected on the ice, where his score of 108.16 was less than a point off his world-leading mark this season.
“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.”
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.
“Obviously this is not what we anticipated from Ilia. This is not what we’ve seen him do in the past, and it was really hard to see him struggle through that performance,” Olympian Mariah Bell said. “He had several mistakes in this program. He had a couple popped elements, elements that he fell on.”
Malinin started off strong, opening 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.
“When a skater pops an element that means they’re going into an intended triple, or for him the quad axel. He gets a little tight and he opens up in rotation, so instead of completing a quad axel, he actually only did a single axel. You get almost no points for a single axel, so he’s losing a lot of points right there later on in the program.”
He 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.
“When you’re a skater at such a high stress, high stakes event and you start to make these mistakes, you go a little bit into fight or flight,” Bell said. “You could tell he was really trying to keep it together, really working to get all the points that he could. And when things start to feel like they just get out of your grip, you get really tense and that’s when more mistakes tend to happen.”
When asked what led to the unexpected performance, Malinin said it was “definitely mental.”
“Just now finally experiencing that Olympic atmosphere,” he said. “It’s crazy. It’s not like any other competition.”
“I’ve been through a lot,” Malinin added. “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. But Malinin didn’t let his sorrow get in the way of his sportsmanship.
“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.”
Malinin still leaves the Winter Olympics a gold medalist in the team event, but as for what comes next, he’s determined to prevent what happened on Friday from happening again.
“I think obviously I should take the stuff that I learned from here and use it to my knowledge to see what I can do in the future for this to not happen,” he said.
“It is extremely high stakes, high pressure,” Bell said. “Especially for somebody like Ilia, he’s coming in with all of the expectation in the world on his shoulders, and I think Ilia showed us today that while he is this incredible athlete, he is a human being just like all of us, and it just wasn’t his day.”
The men’s free skate event will re-air in primetime on NBC starting at 7:30 p.m. CT.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
