MILAN — The Quad God is mortal after all.
This was almost equivalent to if Michael Phelps missed the podium in the 400m relay at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Or if Usain Bolt stumbled in the 200m dash in the 2012 London Games.
If Simone Biles, who happened to be in attendance at the Milan Ice Skating Arena, faltered in Rio in 2016.
Ilia Malinin reacts during the men's free skate program in figure skating at the 2026 Winter Olympics. AP
Malinin reacts after competing in the Men Single Skating on day seven of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Ice Skating Arena on February 13, 2026 in Milan, Italy. Getty Images
That is the magnitude of Ilia Malinin's implosion during the men's free skate Friday night, when the heavily favored American figure skater fell twice in a nightmarish performance and missed the podium entirely as he plummeted to eighth place.
Kazakhstan's Mikhail Shaidorov looked astounded as he realized he had captured gold with a score of 198.64.
The immense disappointment was dripping off Malinin's face, the disbelief that he crumbled with another gold medal well within reach.
Ilia Malinin does a back flip while competing during the men's free skate program in figure skating at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. AP
"I blew it," a stunned Malinin said in an interview with NBC after walking off the ice.
Malinin, who squandered a comfortable lead from a stellar short program, is far from the first individual American athlete to underperform at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, joining alpine skiers Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsey Vonn, as well as snowboarder Chloe Kim, the 21-year-old who couldn't deliver in front of a star-studded crowd that included Biles, Jeff Goldblum and Dorthy Hamill.
The 264.49 points Malinin finished with counted as his worst total score in nearly four years. It snapped an unbeaten streak that spanned over two years and 14 competitions worldwide.
A mere average showing probably would've secured a second gold medal for Malinin, after the U.S. won the team event on Feb. 8, but the Virginia native turned in an extremely uncharacteristic performance that got out of hand early. After opening with a quad flip, which was one of a record-tying seven quad jumps in his planned program, Malinin closed in on what was supposed to be a quad axel — a move that has never been executed on an Olympic stage and one only he has ever landed in competition.
He ultimately had to bail out of it and settled for a single, but that was only the beginning.
Despite landing his quad lutz, Malinin botched the remainder of his skate by either falling short on his planned quads/combinations or falling to the ice entirely. Asked by The Post if failing to deliver on the quad axel — the most difficult jump in the sport — threw him off, Malinin said he knew he didn't necessarily have to have a perfect program.
"Honestly, still, I'm trying to understand what happened, specifically," he said. "I think something felt off. I don't know what it was specifically. I'm still trying to understand what that was."
Malinin acknowledged that the pressure of winning at the Olympics had started to get to him after Japan's Yuma Kagiyama beat him in the short program of the team event.
Malinin falls after a quadruple lutz jump during his performance on Friday. REUTERS
But the self-proclaimed Quad God — a moniker that originated in 2020 in his Instagram handle (ilia_quadg0d_malinin) — has brought more to men's figure skating than many thought possible. Bringing the backflip back to the Olympics for the first time since American skater Terry Kubicha did it at the 1976 Games in Innsbruck, Austria, Malinin still has so much ahead of him.
Anybody who declares themselves a God, however, is tempting fate.
Malinin had all the swagger in the world when he skated out for warmups. He pretended to gear up for a backflip before shaking his finger at the camera with a smirk on his face.
What came next could follow Malinin for years to come.
"I think it's just something that you have to take what happened, or what you've learned from this, and really just change," Malinin said. "Or decide what you want to do for the future and how to approach things."
