The brilliant American was expected to glide to a gold medal on Friday. It was tough to watch such a gifted athlete discover the ruthlessness of his sport
B
y the time Ilia Malinin reached the closing stretch of his Olympic free skate, the outcome was no longer really the story. The story was the expression on his face – not panic, not shock, but the dawning realization that a destiny he had controlled for nearly three years had slipped beyond his reach in the blinding span of four and a half catastrophic minutes.
For the rising generation of men’s skaters, the 21-year-old Malinin has existed less as a rival than as a moving technical horizon. The Quad God. The skater who built programs around jumps others still treated as theory, who pushed the sport into something closer to applied physics. Much like Simone Biles, who took in Friday’s contest from the arena’s VIP seats, his only competition was himself.
The three-year unbeaten run that stretched back through 14 competitions was only the baseline of the Malinin mythos. The prodigy from the northern Virginia suburbs wasn’t beating his opponents so much as bringing them to heel. Twenty-three months ago in Montreal after winning his first world title with his buzzy Succession-theme routine, Malinin sat only feet away while Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama volunteered an extraordinary confession to reporters: “If we both perform at 100% of our ability, I don’t think that I will be able to win.”
