Ilia Malinin entered the Olympic free skate as the runaway favorite. Early mistakes triggered a meltdown that laid bare the brutal math of modern figure skating
What made Ilia Malinin’s Olympic defeat so shocking was not simply his years-long dominance entering Friday night. It was how completely the competition had tilted in his favor before he even stepped on the ice.
For nearly three years, Malinin had been men’s skating’s guiding light: unbeaten since late 2023, winner of back-to-back world titles, the skater who recalibrated the sport’s technical ceiling and then made winning look procedural. He arrived at the Milano Ice Skating Arena 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 what happened around him.
One by one, the contenders who could realistically threaten him faltered. Italy’s Daniel Grassl fell out of podium contention. France’s Adam Siao Him Fa lost ground. Several skaters struggled to generate clean technical content on ice. (Some athletes have privately questioned its quality.) By the time Malinin took the stage at 10.48pm local time, the event had effectively opened for him.
