Ilia Malinin’s collapse: Olympics are a different kind of pressure

MILAN — When she skated, Tara Lipinski was always nervous. But it was different before the free skate at the 1998 Olympics. The teenager cried that morning. She called her parents after the six-minute warm-up and told them she couldn’t do it. Her legs were physically shaking in her initial pose. She didn’t know what to do.

“When you go to the Olympics, there’s no training for it,” said Lipinski, now an analyst for NBC. “You don’t know what you’ll feel until you actually feel it.”

The awesome dream that often begins as a child can quickly turn into a nightmare for athletes blinded by the Olympic spotlight. If Lipinski achieved her dream by becoming Olympic champion in Nagano, she knows the suffocating feeling of competing under the Olympic rings.

She knows the stress that devoured Ilia Malinin on Friday in Milan.

Malinin’s fall from favorite to eighth highlighted the unpredictability of the Olympic stage. The 21-year-old nicknamed “the quad god” was supposed to throw the first quadruple axel in Olympic history. The jump with four and a half twists that he successfully performed at the age of 17 made headlines in the Olympic cycle.

Struggling with nerves and the conditioning needed for a long Olympic competition, he didn’t use it during the team competition or his individual short program. The free skate would be the last opportunity. It felt like the perfect coronation for the future Olympic champion.

Then he jumped in mid-air.

“I think, for me, I’d be like, ‘Oh, man, I just missed what everyone was expecting,'” Lipinski said. “You go through this minute of being shaken and you have to come back to [the program]. …The next jump [he] I couldn’t completely reset it and shake it. And then once this next mistake happened – and for Ilia, who doesn’t make mistakes – I think it was probably very difficult for him.

The standing-room-only crowd gasped when Malinin dropped the quad axel. Fans became even more concerned when he fell two jumps later. They tried to stimulate him as the errors piled up. Instead of joyful encouragement, the applause sounded like despair in the arena.

Ilia Malinin falls during her free program at the Milan-Cortina Games on Friday.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Eight years ago, when Nathan Chen buckled under Olympic pressure in Pyeongchang, the crowd’s gasps every time he stumbled in his short program only made one of the toughest moments of his career even more difficult.

“It hurts your gut,” Chen said in a video for Yahoo Sports. “You get up and mentally you have to refresh yourself…but also the energy changes in the arena. You can tell there’s tension now.”

Chen, then 18 in his Olympic debut, bounced back in a fearless free skate that propelled him to fifth overall. He has become almost unbeatable for the next Olympic cycle. At the Beijing Games, he set the world record in the short program, exorcised the demons of 2018 and became the United States’ first Olympic gold medalist in the men’s singles in 12 years.

Malinin was a contender at these Games four years ago. He finished second at the 2022 U.S. Championships but was left off the Olympic team following a controversial decision. Then only 17 years old, he was only in his first full season of senior competition.

But Malinin was already ready to be the future of the sport. Just attending the Games as an understudy to Chen’s lead role would have been a valuable experience.

Instead, U.S. Figure Skating selected third place Vincent Zhou and fourth place Jason Brown.

Sitting with his coaches waiting for his score Friday, a frustrated Malinin said that if he had been sent to Beijing, he “wouldn’t have skated like that.”

“It’s not easy,” he said as cameras zoomed in on his face.

He shrugged his shoulders. It reset.

“It’s done,” he said.

“I think if I had gone to 22, I would have had more experience and I would know how to handle this Olympic environment,” Malinin said posed in the interview area of ​​the mixed zone. “But also, I don’t know what the next steps in my life would look like if I went there. So now all I can do is just recharge and really take in the information that’s happened and figure out how to deal with the future.”

Malinin said he wants to skate for three Olympic cycles. The first attempt ended in resounding disappointment. This could only make the return smoother.

“He will dominate the sport for years to come,” Lipinski said. “It’s obviously been a huge heartbreak for him, but we’ll see him get back up. »