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It’s been a bit of a whirlwind week for Ilia Malinin, who arrived at his first Olympics as the no-brainer winner of the men’s figure-skating event. The four-time U.S. champion has outscored his competitors by as much as 10, 30, or 40 points in the past. So essentially, he was untouchable, and the battle was for silver and bronze.
But in his first appearances on Olympic ice, Malinin showed some fallibility and faltered in the short program of the team event, finishing behind Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama. He won the free program segment in the team event, but wasn’t his usual dominant self. He seemed to have shaken off the nerves for the individual men’s event a couple of days later and finished in first, nearly six points ahead of Kagiyama. The gold was his to lose. All he had to do was skate the free program that had made history, with seven quad jumps, and he would be the indisputable champion.
After erupting in applause when he was introduced, the Milano Ice Skating Arena fell silent as Malinin took his starting position and his music —actually Malinin’s own voice in an opening spoken word section—began. He landed a clean quad flip to start the program and seemed to be on track to repeat his seven-quad performance from December. But it soon became clear that his victory was hardly a sure thing. The next jump was supposed to be the quad axel that only he has landed in competition, but he popped it in the air and only received points for a single axel. He seemed to brush off that mistake and landed a solid quad lutz, but then faltered on the planned quad loop and opened up again in the air, completing only two rotations.
Read more: U.S. Wins the First Figure Skating Event of the Milano Cortina Olympics
The mistakes began taking a toll. His next jump was a combination, starting with the quad lutz, but he fell on that jump and wasn’t able to complete the next two in the series, and received deductions for repeating the quad lutz (skaters can only perform…
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