How the Quad God fell back down to earth and lost Olympic gold

Milan: In the history of OIympic sport, summer or winter, there has seldom been such a fall as Ilia Malinin’s on the final night of the men’s single figure skating, when the skating prodigy known as the ‘Quad God’ twice stumbled and landed, backside-first, on the ice.

Malinin was the final competitor, as the leader of the 24-man field. The skater viewed as his only realistic rival for gold, Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, had fallen only minutes earlier.

This seemed to make Malinin’s skate a procession, in which the main interest would be his execution – the first seen in the Olympics – of the patented Quadruple Axel.

But the Quad God, having pulled out his planned execution of the quadruple axel, lost his balance on landing once attempting a quad lutz, falling on to his backside, and then – clearly having not recovered his mental equilibrium – he fell again on the last sequence, a combination.

He finished eighth. The gold medal was taken by unheralded Kazak Mikhail Shaidorov, who had been fifth after the short skate two nights earlier. Kagiyami, despite his fall, recovered well enough to take the silver, his compatriot Shun Sato also out-performing his ranking from the short skate to take bronze.

Ilia Malinin at the end of his routine.Credit: AP

Malinin shook his head as his botched routine ended, cognisant of how he had fallen to the occasion and blown it.

Shaidorov, who had skated without blemish and nailed every axel, toeloop and lutz – the moves that sound like German car components – was as stunned as anyone.

The collective gasp at Malinin’s second fall was a recognition that they witnessed something extraordinary, that a skater who had revolutionised the sport with his aerial revolutions, had fallen further than was imaginable.

Ilia Malinin falls in his final routine.Credit: AP

Malinin, like those watching, was struggling to comprehend what had unfolded.

“I’m trying to understand what happened specifically, but I know that it’s done, so I can’t change the outcome,” he said to the media pack, more interested in his failure than in the gold medallist.

“I feel like a lot of people, if they could, they would definitely go back and change all the outcomes they had.

“My life has been through a lot of ups and downs, and just before getting into my starting pose, I just felt all of those experiences, memories, thoughts really just rush in, and it just felt so overwhelming. I didn’t really know how to handle it in that moment.”

He said “so many negative thoughts flooded in there. And I just did not handle it.”

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One fall might have been surmounted if he regained his composure, as Kagiyama did. But the whole routine was off-key. He completed the backflip that Novak Djokovic found so entertaining. Little else was at his standard.

Among those watching this dramatic descent was another American sporting superstar, who rarely fluffed her lines – or landings – in competition, Simone Biles. Presumably, she was also there to see Malinin make history by deploying his quad axel, not for the consecutive crashes.

History, of a different hue, was made.

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