{"id":200477,"date":"2026-02-15T07:41:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T07:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/figure-skating-world-shocked-by-ilia-malinins-olympic-performance-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T07:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T07:41:09","slug":"figure-skating-world-shocked-by-ilia-malinins-olympic-performance-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/figure-skating-world-shocked-by-ilia-malinins-olympic-performance-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Figure skating world shocked by Ilia Malinin's Olympic performance – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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MILAN \u2014 Members of the figure skating community described the shock they felt watching Ilia Malinin\u2019s mistake-ridden performance Friday <\/a>night, trying to help fans understand how the sport\u2019s most dominant athlete performed so far below expectations.
Entering the Milan Cortina Olympics <\/a>as the heavy gold-medal favorite, Malinin stumbled multiple times during his routine and lost 72 points to deductions as he fell from first to eighth place. The self-proclaimed \u201cQuad God\u201d also failed to perform his signature quadruple axel jump, and he fell after attempting a quadruple lutz.
\u201cI\u2019m in shock,\u201d NBC Sports Olympic correspondent and 1984 gold medalist Scott Hamilton said Friday. \u201cThere was no way he could lose. And not only no way he could lose, no way he wasn\u2019t going to win by 30. With his body of work and everything we\u2019ve seen coming into this event, he\u2019s unbeatable. I got asked, \u2018Is anyone able to beat Ilia Malinin?\u2019 and I said, \u2018Only Ilia.\u2019 And that happened tonight.\u201d
Nathan Chen, who won a gold medal in the men\u2019s single skating event in 2022, empathized with Malinin. At the 2018 Olympics, Chen struggled during his short program in both team and individual competition after entering with high expectations.
\u201cI can definitely reflect back on my experience in 2018 when I went into the short program with a lot of pressure, a lot of concerns, a lot of doubt,\u201d Chen said in a video<\/a> for Yahoo Sports. \u201c[Malinin] went into his quad axel and singled, and so you could see that every single element he started holding back a little bit more. … And by the end of it, just was not his night.\u201d
After the result, Malinin said, \u201cAll of this pressure, all of the media, and just being the Olympic gold hopeful was a lot. It was too much to handle.\u201d
Chen said the experience of skating in the Olympics is more difficult than in other competitions.
\u201cOne of the hardest parts about performing for a huge sold-out crowd is you can viscerally feel the reaction from the crowd,\u201d Chen said. \u201cI remember when I went for my first jump and I fell, the whole crowd went \u2018ooh.\u2019 That just hurts you to your gut. Mentally, you have to refresh, you have to figure out what went wrong, but also the energy just changes in the arena, you can feel there\u2019s tension now.\u201d
There was certainly tension early in Malinin\u2019s free skate, when he seemed primed to attempt a quadruple axel and ultimately settled for a single, a jump that drew an audible reaction from the crowd.
Malinin\u2019s issues also appeared to be mental to NBC Sports analyst and 1998 Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski.
\u201cI don\u2019t think we can even point to anything that truly happened technically,\u201d Lipinski said on NBC on Friday night. \u201cIt was all mental. I never thought that he could be off the podium.\u201d
Malinin, 21, was expected to dominate the Olympics, as he\u2019s run away with most international competitions over the last few years and hadn\u2019t lost since 2023.
After not being selected for the United States team for the 2022 Games in Beijing, Malinin has won the last two World Championships, three straight Grand Prix finals and three straight U.S. Championships, often with huge leads over second place.
\u201cEvery little skater, every little athlete in any sport that\u2019s in the Olympic Games, across summer and winter, you dream about that moment in front of the entire world,\u201d NBC Sports\u2019 Johnny Weir said Friday. \u201cAnd when you get there, it\u2019s of course a huge and monumental achievement, but then you\u2019re there and this is what it feels like.\u201d
\u201cYou\u2019re all of a sudden thrust in front of the entire world instead of just your niche sport. It gets so huge, and everything you\u2019ve ever dreamt about, everything that you\u2019ve ever bled, sweated or cried for comes down to \u2014 in our sport \u2014 six minutes in front of the world. And that pressure is a lot to handle.\u201d
Rohan Nadkarni is a sports reporter for NBC News.\u00a0
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeMILAN \u2014 Members of the figure skating community described the shock they felt watching Ilia Malinin\u2019s mistake-ridden performance Friday night, trying to help fans understand how the sport\u2019s most dominant athlete performed so far below expectations.Entering the Milan Cortina Olympics as the heavy gold-medal favorite, Malinin stumbled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":200478,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-200477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}