Anatomy of an Olympic Upset: How Ilia Malinin Lost Figure Skating Gold
Ilia Malinin entered the Olympic free skate as the runaway favourite, with years of dominance and a significant lead. However, early mistakes triggered a catastrophic meltdown that laid bare the unforgiving mathematics of modern figure skating scoring. What made this defeat so shocking was not just his pre-competition supremacy but how the event had seemingly tilted entirely in his favour before he even took to the ice.
The Stage Was Set for Victory
For nearly three years, Malinin had been the guiding light of men's figure skating. Unbeaten since late 2023, a back-to-back world champion, he had recalibrated the sport's technical ceiling and made winning look routine. Arriving at the Milano Ice Skating Arena, he led by more than five points after the short program and carried the most difficult planned program in the field. Under normal competitive logic, this combination should have been decisive.
Adding to the sense of inevitability, his closest rivals faltered one by one. Italy's Daniel Grassl fell out of podium contention, France's Adam Siao Him Fa lost ground, and several skaters struggled with the ice quality, which some athletes have privately questioned. By the time Malinin took the stage at 10:48 PM local time, the event had effectively opened for him, making what followed over the next seven minutes all the more difficult to process.
The Chain Reaction of Errors
The official result—eighth place overall after entering the free skate with a five-point lead—only tells part of the story. The deeper explanation lies in the scoring sheet: the collapse of base value, the loss of combination opportunities, and cascading technical penalties that occur when a skater must improvise a program designed for precise execution.
On paper, Malinin started strong with a quad flip scoring over 15 points. But then came a critical moment: instead of a planned high-value axel, likely a triple, he produced only a single axel worth barely a point. For casual viewers, this might seem minor, but in modern scoring, it is enormous. Programs are built like financial portfolios, with high-value jumps stacked, especially in the second half for bonus points. Losing one early shifts the entire scoring balance from building a lead to recovering from a deficit.
Malinin did not need perfection to win; a controlled, slightly scaled-back version likely would have secured the title. Instead, the structure unravelled. After a brief recovery with a quad lutz, a planned quad loop became a double, cutting roughly 10 points. Then came a fall on a quad lutz combination, reducing its score to barely three points. Later, a planned quad salchow-triple axel sequence turned into a double salchow and a fall, wiping out another double-digit opportunity. By the final third, Malinin was no longer performing to win but trying to mitigate damage, a strategy that cannot salvage an Olympic title in today's ruthlessly precise scoring system.
The Scoring Gap and Olympic Pressure
Malinin's technical score of 76.61 points paled in comparison to surprise winner Mikhail Shaidorov's 114.68. At the Olympic level, this gap represents the difference between control and survival. Technical scores in the 100-plus range typically define medal contention; dropping into the mid-70s removes a skater from the competitive ceiling. Multiple skaters cleared 100 points, while Malinin did not come close, a staggering reversal for an athlete who built dominance on overwhelming technical margins.
Shaidorov did not try to match Malinin's difficulty ceiling. Instead, the 21-year-old Kazakh executed a proven formula: several extremely difficult jumps, including five quads with two in combination, clean landings, positive execution scores, no falls, and no major deductions. Crucially, he preserved his jump layout structure even on imperfect elements, maintaining combination opportunities and second-half bonus scoring. In modern judging, this matters as much as raw difficulty—a slightly flawed quad that stays upright can still generate major points, while a fall erases them entirely.
Malinin had hinted all week that the Olympic atmosphere felt different. In the aftermath, he revealed becoming awash in thoughts, losing awareness of his program's progression. Under normal competitions, his extreme difficulty allows room for small mistakes, but that margin disappears under extreme psychological duress. One mistake leads to another, and Olympic pressure exacerbates this chain reaction. Notably, an NBC hot mic caught him saying after his skate, "[If they had] sent me to Beijing, I wouldn't have skated like that," referencing his controversial omission from the 2022 US Olympic team.
Implications Beyond the Result
Malinin remains the sport's technical revolutionary at 21, a two-time reigning world champion likely to define the next Olympic cycle. However, Milan may reshape how he—and perhaps the sport—thinks about winning championships. For three seasons, he forced rivals to chase maximum difficulty to stay competitive, shifting the technical baseline of men's skating. Friday served as a reminder that another path exists: clean programs still win, four or five quads can still beat seven, and execution beats theoretical difficulty when pressure is highest.
The Olympics, more than any other event, reward the skater who preserves structure rather than pushing possibility to its edge. Malinin may still set the sport's limits, but the Games are decided by who can stay inside them. This upset underscores the brutal reality of modern figure skating, where even the most dominant technical skater is not immune to the unforgiving math of scoring under pressure.
