From Favorite to Heartbreak: Ilia Malinin Collapses Twice on the Ice, Struggles to Hold Back Tears, and Leaves the Final Without a Medal

Ilia Malinin shocked with two falls and several failed elements during the men’s figure skating final at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The 21-year-old figure skater finished eighth in men’s figure skating on Friday, Feb. 13, shocking the crowd at the Milano Ice Skating Arena as he struggled through his free skate program and was holding back tears as he stepped off the ice.

“I blew it,” he said in an interview with NBC just after his score of 156.33 in the free skate, and 264.49 overall, was announced. “Honestly, that was the first thing that came to my mind. I have no words, honestly.”

Malinin started with a quadruple flip, which he executed, but didn’t complete his famed quadruple axel, instead doing a single axel. His next move, a quadruple lutz, was clean, but his quadruple loop turned into a double loop. He fell twice from there, and did his best to finish out the four-minute program, throwing in a backflip at the end.

Ilia Malinin after the free skate at the 2026 Winter Olympics.WANG Zhao / AFP via Getty

Malinin — self-nicknamed the “Quad God” — is the only figure skater in history to successfully land a quadruple axel in competition, which he did cleanly for the first time at the U.S. International Figure Skating Classic in Sept. 2022 and has repeated multiple times since. He was expected to make history with the move on Friday, but nerves got the best of him.

“I think it was definitely mental,” he told NBC afterwards, and when asked if the Olympics stage caused him to struggle, he agreed, saying, “It’s not like any other competition.”

Malinin, who was already an Olympic gold medalist after he helped Team USA secure a team event gold on Sunday, came into the night in first place, after earning a score of 108.16 in the men’s short program on Tuesday.

Coming into his skate, it was Malinin’s to lose, with the two previous skaters and his biggest rivals both falling during their programs. But with Malinin’s errors, a jubilant Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov won gold, his country’s first-ever first place finish in Olympic figure skating.

Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov.WANG Zhao / AFP via Getty

About 30 minutes after his eighth-place finish, Malinin told reporters that he was still reckoning with what happened on the ice.

“Honestly, I still haven’t been able to process what just happened, it’s a lot of mixed emotions,” he said. “Going into this competition I felt really good, this whole day I felt very solid, and I just thought that all I needed to do is go out there and trust the process that I’ve always been doing with every competition. But of course, it’s not like any other competition. It’s the Olympics, and I think people only realize the pressure in the nerves that actually happen from the inside, so it was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like I had no control.”

When asked if he thought there was an issue with the ice that also led his competitors to fall, Malinin said the ice was maybe “not the best condition,” but it was “something I cannot complain about because we’re all put in that situation.”

Malinin said that he thinks it was largely nerves that got to him.

“Going into that starting post I just felt like, you know, all the just dramatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there’s just like so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there and I just did not handle it,” he said.

Being the gold medal favorite, Malinin said, “is really just a lot to deal with, especially for my age.”

To learn more about all the Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, come to people.com to check out ongoing coverage before, during and after the games. Watch the Milan Cortina Olympics and Paralympics, beginning Feb. 6, on NBC and Peacock.