This was the Ilia Malinin everyone had expected to see on that fateful night at last month’s Winter Olympics in Milan.
The one who Thursday did a program with easily the hardest jumps of anyone in the field at the World Championships in Prague.
The one who nailed them all — quadruple flip, then triple Axel, then quadruple Lutz-triple toe loop combination — to command the short program and build a lead of nearly 10 points in his bid for a third straight world title in men’s singles.
Or maybe not quite that Ilia.
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“This is another version of me, another part of me that just appeared out of nowhere, the person not trying to put so much expectations on me,” Malinin said Thursday. “This is me just wanting to enjoy doing what I love.”
That is the way Malinin sees himself now, six weeks after the free skate supposed to culminate with an Olympic title that had been a foregone conclusion for two seasons. It was instead the free skate in which he fell on two quads, popped two more into doubles and turned another, his trademark quad Axel, into a single.
He finished 15th in the free and staggered from first after the short program to eighth in the final standings. The demise was incomprehensible.
“That was such an unreal experience,” he said. “I don’t think I will ever (re)live something like that.”
He has, understandably, relived it in his mind often, trying to pinpoint the reasons for his undoing and to learn from them. In the immediate aftermath, searching for answers, he attributed it to pressure far greater than anticipated but also told NBC’s Andrea Joyce, “Maybe I was too confident.”
“Coming back from there was just really hard,” Malinin said Thursday. “A few days, I kept thinking about it, 24/7, and (of) so many different things that I could have done differently to give a different outcome.
“But in the end, this outcome is what happened, and I had to move on. In a different universe I would have won the Olympics and maybe decided not to do the World Championships. But here I am.”
He had, in fact, been in a different universe than his rivals, winning the 2024 World title by a whopping 24 and the 2025 title by 31. At December’s Grand Prix Final, he had broken his own free skate world record by 10 points while becoming the first to cleanly land all six types of quadruple jumps in a single program.
Malinin regained his otherworldly stature in the judges’ eyes Thursday. His short program score was a personal best 111.29, the sixth highest ever (a list topped by Nathan Chen’s 113.97) and highest by an active skater.
His four jumps were all beautifully executed and rock solid, his spins and step sequence all given the highest levels. His component scores topped the field.
And the free skate, where he can do up to seven quads, is where Malinin’s advantage usually grows exponentially.
Except at the Olympics, when the men’s final took place on Friday the 13th. Freaky Friday, indeed.
“It’s done,” he said. “I’ve got to move on, to keep going. There’s no reason for me to go crazy.
“Anything can happen. All you have to do is just understand that moment, take in everything you’ve learned, use it as information, motivation.”
Because he had shown substantial bravado in adopting quadg0d as his social media handle before he became even a U.S. champion, because he backed that up by never backing down from doing quadruple jumps (and multiples of them) he might not have needed to win, there was an impression he was invulnerable both competitively and personally.
After all, he had won 14 straight events, two of them World Championships, heading into the Olympics, most by the huge margins created by his many landmark jumping achievements.
Yet he was clearly bothered by online criticism that he was arrogant, that all he could do was jump. Like many of his generation, Malinin likely knows he shouldn’t pay so much attention to social media but still gives in to its Circean lure.
“On the world’s biggest stage, those who appear the strongest may still be fighting invisible battles on the inside,” Malinin wrote on Instagram three days after coming undone in the Olympic free skate.
“Even your happiest memories can end up tainted by the noise. Vile online hatred attacks the mind and fear lures it into the darkness, no matter how hard you try to stay sane through the endless insurmountable pressure. It all builds up as these moments flash before your eyes, resulting in an inevitable crash.”
While few will forget what happened to him with a gold medal seemingly just four minutes away, that night should also be remembered by how he handled it. Malinin fulfilled all his media obligations after having put his disappointment aside to immediately embrace and congratulate the surprise winner, Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan.
Fans around the world recognized that sportsmanship by choosing Malinin as winner of the International Olympic Committee’s Fair Play Award for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“I think that even at our worst moments, we have to appreciate everything that goes on around us,” Malinin said Thursday.
The crowd at Prague’s 02 Arena gave Malinin a very warm — and very loud — greeting when he took the ice for his warm-up, a clear sign that his popularity among skating fans has not diminished.
Having once been apparently misled into thinking the noise surrounding him was all acclamation, he is looking elsewhere for approval.
“I think the main thing is how I feel on the inside, how I feel about myself,” he said.
When his short program was over Thursday, Malinin gave no broad gestures of celebration. He simply smiled, bowed to the fans and left the ice to await his scores, which were so good that there was little question he had won the short program, even with two skaters to go.
He has a 9.44-point lead over France’s Adam Siao Him Fa going into Saturday’s free skate. That should be more than enough.
(Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at the last 13 Winter Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCSports.com)
