Ilia Malinin falls twice as Kazakhstan’s Shaidorov stuns field for Olympic gold | Winter Olympics 2026

For almost two years, Ilia Malinin has made men’s figure skating predictable in the most spectacular way possible. On Friday night, in the southern suburbs of Milan, the Olympics reminded the sport, and perhaps Malinin himself, that predictability is never guaranteed on its biggest stage.

Big favorite in the free program, the 21-year-old American instead saw the Olympic title slip away from Kazakh Mikhail Shaidorov after a performance strewn with errors which will remain among the greatest shocks in the history of figure skating.

Shaidorov’s season-best total of 291.58 vaulted him from fifth place after the short program as one favorite competitor after another faltered. Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama (280.06) and Shun Sato (274.90) took silver and bronze, respectively, on a night where even the sport’s most reliable jump technicians struggled to hold their programs together.

Malinin entered the final segment with a lead of just over five points, a margin that under normal circumstances would have allowed him to skate conservatively and still win. This was not to be the case.

Malinin was the last of 24 skaters to take the ice, with the Olympic title seemingly within his grasp after his closest rivals failed. He started with a quad flip and a quad lutz, but the mistakes quickly piled up. The planned quad axel was reduced to just one and later came across another quad lutz. He also doubled the jumps he would normally perform with more rotations, although he salvaged points with a four-toe loop combination.

He finished with 156.33 in the free skate and 264.49 overall, surprisingly falling short of the podium in a distant eighth place.

The invincibility that defined Malinin’s competitive aura over the past two seasons has been shattered.

“I ruined everything,” Malinin said afterward. “That’s honestly the first thing that came to my mind. There’s no way that’s going to happen. I was preparing the whole season and I was so confident in my program, so confident in everything. I really have no words.”

The result ends an unbeaten streak of more than two years spanning 14 competitions, including two world titles and three consecutive Grand Prix final victories. By participating in the Milan Cortina Games, Malinin had redefined the technical limits of the sport, becoming the only skater in history to successfully complete the quadruple axel in competition and building programs around a quadruple record difficulty.

Yet even before Friday, her Olympic experience had shown flashes of vulnerability. He was beaten by Kagiyama in the short program of the team event and later admitted that the pressure of competing on Olympic ice initially overwhelmed him. Although he bounced back to help the United States win team gold, his performance lacked the usual sense of technical inevitability.

During Tuesday’s individual short program, that swagger seemed restored. Malinin took a five-point lead that seemed insurmountable given his planned seven-quad free skate – the most difficult program ever attempted at the Olympics. During training at the American team’s alternative base in Bergamo a few hours before the final, he apparently did not fall once. Then came a performance that will leave scars for years.

“It’s definitely not a good feeling,” Malinin said. “All these years of training and preparation, honestly, it happened so fast. I didn’t have time to think about what I should do or anything. Everything happens so fast.”

In the end, Malinin was skating largely out of pride rather than ranking. After striking his final pose, he was visibly distraught.

“The pressure of the Olympics really gets to you,” Malinin said. “People say there is an Olympic curse, that the favorite for the Olympic gold medal will always skate poorly in the Olympics.

“The pressure is unreal. It’s definitely not easy, but I’m still proud to have made it to the end.”

For 21-year-old Shaidorov, this moment marked a career breakthrough and a milestone for Kazakhstan. Her clean, poised free skate – built on five quads and efficient execution – proved exactly the type of performance that wins Olympic titles when the favorites crumble. He looked as surprised as anyone when the final scores came in and his ranking was official.

He became Kazakhstan’s first Olympic figure skating champion, giving his country the first gold medal at these Games and the first gold medal in a winter Olympic sport since Lillehammer 1994.

Kagiyama’s silver medal marked his second consecutive Olympic runner-up, cementing his reputation as one of the sport’s most reliable championship athletes. Sato’s bronze medal capped a strong night for Japan, whose technical depth was once again on display on the sport’s biggest stage.

Inside the arena, the atmosphere shifted from anticipation to disbelief as the standings solidified. What seemed like a crowning achievement for Malinin instead became a reminder of Olympic reality: even generational dominance can dissolve in seven minutes of skating.

For Malinin, the defeat is unlikely to change the broader trajectory of his career. At 21, he remains the sport’s most technically gifted skater and the architect of its current technical revolution. But that night, Olympic history belonged to someone else. And for the first time in years, men’s figure skating suddenly seems open again.