2026 Winter Olympics: Mikhail Shaidorov wins men’s figure skating gold as ‘Quad God’ Ilia Malinin crumbles

But it was a timid routine. The quad axel replaced by a single, a quad loop reduced to a double. Dreams turned into rubble.

On his quad salchow, he only performed a double, then fell. Reality hit, and so did the ice.

Malinin’s free program was the 15th best of the evening. He only scored 156.33 points, more than 40 points behind Shaidorov.

He performed a backflip to entertain the crowd, but it seemed like a desperate call for the good times from last week.

In the team event, he also landed the first legal backflip at the Olympics since American champion Terry Kubicka in 1976 – after which he was banned for safety reasons.

Thanks in part to skaters like France’s Surya Bonaly – who performed the move illegally but successfully at Nagano 1998 – the backflip is now legal again.

Malinin became the first to succeed at the Games since the ban was overturned, and made the jump again in the short program.

But in reality, none of that mattered. And after the scores arrived, Malinin went straight to Shaidorov to congratulate him.

It is Kazakhstan’s first gold medal at the Winter Olympics since Lillehammer 1994, when Vladimir Smirnov won the men’s 50 km cross-country skiing event. It was 10 years before 21-year-old Shaidorov was born.

After a slight slip on the quad lutz, Shaidorov held the lead as everyone else lost theirs and produced his own quad techniques.

All hail the new Quad God.