Ilia Malinin misses out on Olympic medal after falling in free skate and finishes in eighth place

In a shocking turn at the 2026 Winter Olympics, American figure skater Ilia Malinin He failed to make the podium on Friday, failing to medal after falling twice during the free skate. Kazakh Mikhail Shaidorov took the gold.

Malinin, known as the “Quad God” for his talent in quadruple jumps, seemed visibly excited after skating.

The 21-year-old, who was leading by a comfortable margin after the short program, only had to put in a mediocre performance to add the individual gold to the gold medal he already had. won the team event. Instead, he was fighting back tears after one of the worst nights of his career, one that left a star-studded crowd inside the Milano Ice Arena sitting in stunned silence.

Shaidorov finished with a career-best 291.58 points to give his nation its first Winter Games gold medal, while Yuma Kagiyama He won his second consecutive Olympic silver medal and his Japanese teammate Shun Sato took the bronze.

Then there was Malinin, who fell to eighth place. He finished with 264.49 points, ending an undefeated streak of more than two years that spanned 14 full competitions, including the last two world championships which he won easily.

“Honestly, yeah, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “I felt like coming into this competition I was very ready. I just felt ready to go on that ice. I think maybe that could have been the reason, because I was too confident that it was going to turn out well.”

Much of Malinin’s trip to Milan had felt a little out of place.

Kagiyama defeated him in the short program of the team event, and later acknowledged that the pressure of competing in the Olympics had begun to get to him. And he still wasn’t completely dominant despite a head-to-head victory against Sato in the team free skate, which secured the Americans’ second consecutive gold medal in the event.

But by the time of his individual short program Tuesday night, Malinin’s fearless swagger and incomparable courage had returned. He took a five-point lead over Kagiyama and Adam Siao Him Fa of France that seemed insurmountable heading into Friday night.

Malinin decided to practice early in the day at the US Figure Skating alternative training base in Bergamo, outside Milan, allowing him to escape the Olympic bubble and avoid having to sit in the sand all night. And she was the picture of calm throughout her warm-up, not falling once on all of her practice jumps while wearing her shiny black and gold ensemble.

Then came a performance that could well haunt Malinin for the rest of his career.

He opened with a quad flip, one of the record seven of his planned program, then appeared to go after the quad axel, the only one he had landed in competition, but had to abandon. He recovered to get a quad lutz and then the real problems began.

Malinin only did a double loop instead of the planned quad loop, which threw away his timing. He fell on a quad lutz, which prevented him from doing the second half of the quad lutz-triple toe loop combination that would have earned him big points. And on his last jump pass, which was supposed to be a high-scoring quadruple salchow-triple axel, Malinin could only perform a double salchow, and fell on that.

When the music stopped, Malinin was left trying to mask the pain for a crowd that included Nathan Chen, the 2022 Olympic champion; seven-time Olympic gold medal gymnast Simone Biles, and actor Jeff Goldblum and his wife, Emilie.

Shaidorov was as surprised as everyone when he realized he had won the gold medal.