Anatomy of an Olympic Upset: How Ilia Malinin Lost Figure Skating Gold
Ilia Malinin entered the Olympic free skate as the runaway favorite, but early mistakes triggered a meltdown that laid bare the brutal mathematics of modern figure skating. What made his defeat so shocking was not merely his years-long dominance heading into Friday night. It was how completely the competition had tilted in his favor before he even stepped onto the ice at the Milano Ice Skating Arena.
The Stage Was Set for Victory
For nearly three years, Malinin had been men's skating's guiding light: unbeaten since late 2023, winner of back-to-back world titles, and the skater who recalibrated the sport's technical ceiling, making victory appear procedural. He arrived leading by more than five points after the short program and carrying the most difficult planned program in the field. Under almost any normal competitive logic, that combination should have been decisive.
What made the result feel even closer to inevitable was the faltering of his rivals. Italy's Daniel Grassl fell out of podium contention, France's Adam Siao Him Fa lost ground, and several skaters struggled to generate clean technical content on ice, with some athletes privately questioning its quality. By the time Malinin took the stage at 10:48 PM local time, the event had effectively opened for him.
The Unraveling Begins
That makes what followed over the next seven minutes so difficult to process. 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 sits inside the scoring sheet: the collapse of base value, the loss of combination opportunities, and the cascading technical penalties that follow when one missed element forces a skater to improvise a program designed for execution, not adjustment.
What unfolded in Milan was not just an Olympic upset. It was a case study in how modern figure skating scoring works at its most unforgiving—and why even the most dominant technical skater of his generation was not immune to it.
The First Crack and Its Consequences
On paper, Malinin started like a champion. A quad flip scored more than 15 points with execution bonuses. Then came the moment that changed the entire competition. Instead of a planned high-value axel, likely a triple axel based on recent content, he produced only a single axel, worth barely a point. For casual viewers, this might seem like a small mistake, but in modern figure skating scoring, it is enormous.
Every program is built like a financial portfolio. Skaters stack high-value jumps, especially in the second half where they receive bonus points. Lose one early, and the entire scoring balance shifts. Instead of building a lead, you are suddenly trying to recover one. Critically, Malinin did not need perfection to win. By the time he skated, several direct rivals had already made major errors, and he carried a lead with the hardest planned program. A controlled, slightly scaled-back version was likely to still secure the title.
A Chain Reaction of Errors
Once the axel disappeared, Malinin had to chase points rather than control the program. After briefly recovering with a quad lutz for another massive score, a planned quad loop became a double, cutting roughly 10 points from its expected range. Then came the first fall on the opening leg of a planned quad lutz-single euler-triple flip combination, normally one of his highest-scoring elements. Instead of scoring in the mid-teens, the quad lutz barely cleared three points after deductions.
Later, a planned quad salchow-triple axel sequence—one of the highest-value passes in the program—turned into a double salchow and a fall, effectively wiping out another double-digit scoring opportunity. Even with errors, Malinin still landed one elite combination, but by that point, the structural damage to the program's base value had already been done. By the final third of the skate, he was no longer performing the layout built to win Olympic gold; he was trying to mitigate damage. In modern figure skating, where scoring is ruthlessly precise, you cannot salvage your way to an Olympic title.
The Scoring Gap Explained
Malinin finished with a technical score of 76.61 points, while Mikhail Shaidorov, the surprise winner from Kazakhstan, scored 114.68. At the Olympic level, this is not simply a large margin; it is the difference between skating from a position of control and skating from a position of survival. In elite men's skating, technical element scores in the 100-plus range typically define medal contention. Dropping into the mid-70s effectively removes a skater from the competitive ceiling of the event. Multiple skaters in the field cleared 100 technical points, but Malinin did not come close.
For a skater who built dominance on overwhelming technical margins—often separating from the field before program components were even factored in—the reversal was staggering. The same system that allowed him to dominate when he landed most of his elements offered almost no protection once multiple bedrock jumps disappeared.
Shaidorov's Winning Strategy
Shaidorov did not try to match Malinin's difficulty ceiling. Instead, the 21-year-old Kazakh executed the formula that has quietly won Olympic titles for years: several extremely difficult jumps, including five quads with two in combination, clean landings, positive execution scores, no falls, and no major deductions. Crucially, Shaidorov preserved his jump layout structure even on imperfect elements, maintaining combination opportunities and second-half bonus scoring. In modern judging, that matters as much as raw difficulty. A slightly flawed quad that stays upright and preserves program structure can still generate major points, while a fall or doubled jump erases them entirely.
To casual viewers, this approach can look less spectacular, but under Olympic pressure, it is brutally effective. As top contenders' programs unraveled, the competition stopped being about who could do the most difficult things and became about who could protect the value of the elements they had already planned.
The Olympic Pressure Factor
Malinin had hinted all week that the Olympic atmosphere felt different. His comments in the aftermath revealed as much: he became awash in thoughts and memories from his starting pose rather than clarity, lost awareness of where he was in the program, and felt it all went by too fast to process. In normal competitions, Malinin's extreme difficulty creates room for small mistakes, but that margin can disappear quickly under extreme psychological duress. One mistake becomes two, two becomes three, and with the pressure of an Olympic debut, the entire structure is gone.
Malinin, controversially left off the 2022 US Olympic team despite a second-place finish at nationals, seemed to realize the unique pressure of competing at the Games for the first time. While in the kiss-and-cry area after his disastrous free skate, an NBC hot mic caught him saying: "[If they had] sent me to Beijing, I wouldn't have skated like that."
There is precedent for this kind of Olympic rupture. Nathan Chen debuted at the 2018 Games as a co-favorite and collapsed in the short program, missing the podium despite winning the free skate. One month later, he won the world title, and four years later, he secured Olympic gold. Malinin understands that arc exists, but Olympic defeats carry a different weight when they halt dominance rather than simply postpone it.
Implications Beyond One Result
Malinin remains the sport's technical revolutionary. At 21, he is still the two-time reigning world champion and the skater most likely to define the next Olympic cycle. However, Milan may reshape how he—and perhaps the sport—thinks about winning championships. For three seasons, Malinin forced rivals to chase maximum difficulty simply to stay competitive, shifting the technical baseline of men's skating. Programs that once won major titles suddenly looked conservative, with base value becoming the starting point, not the separator.
Friday was a reminder that another path still exists. Clean programs still win; four or five quads can still beat seven; execution still beats theoretical difficulty when pressure is highest. The Olympics, more than any other event, reward the skater who preserves structure rather than the one who pushes possibility to its edge. Malinin may still set the sport's limits, but the Olympics are decided by who can stay inside them.
