Mikhail Shaidorov Stuns Field to Win Men's Figure Skating Gold as 'Quad God' Ilia Malinin Crumbles
Milan-Cortina 2026 produced one of the Games' most dramatic moments when Mikhail Shaidorov delivered a flawless free skate to capture men's figure skating gold, while pre-event favourite Ilia Malinin fell twice and missed the podium entirely.
Shaidorov skates clean to historic gold
Shaidorov emerged as the lone skater in the final group to skate without error, a performance that turned a chaotic evening into a landmark moment for Kazakhstan. The 114. 68 technical total he posted in the free skate outpaced rivals who struggled to land their planned elements. His gold is the country's first Winter Olympic top podium finish in 32 years, and it arrived in emphatic fashion as other contenders faltered around him.
Malinin's nightmare: favourite falls to eighth
Ilia Malinin arrived in Italy carrying the sport's highest expectations. The 21-year-old, long hailed for pushing the technical frontier with quadruple jumps and famously associated with the quadruple axel, took the ice for the free program at 4: 48pm ET with a lead from the short program and a lineup designed to secure gold.
What followed was a collapse. Malinin performed only a single axel rather than the quadruple axel that had defined his reputation, then fell on a quad lutz in a moment that silenced the arena. Two elements later he fell again. The string of errors forced him to abandon his planned layout and chase points, a strategy that cannot reliably recover the large base value lost by downgraded and missed jumps. He finished eighth, visibly shaken at the end of his skate.
Podium: Kagiyama and Sato capitalise
Japan claimed both silver and bronze. Yuma Kagiyama, seen as Malinin's nearest rival, stumbled on a quad flip and settled for silver, while Shun Sato took bronze. Both skaters capitalised on consistency where many others could not, and their results underline how survival and clean execution can trump higher-risk technical ambitions on any given night.
The unforgiving arithmetic of modern figure skating
The competition showcased the brutal mathematics that govern elite skating. When planned high-value elements are missed or downgraded, the program's base value collapses and the cascading penalties make recovery almost impossible. Malinin's technical score slipped to 76. 61, a gulf that illustrates the distance between a program competing from a position of control and one forced into damage limitation. In the end, the precision of scoring left little room for the dramatic comebacks fans might expect.
Aftermath and what comes next
The event's final six skaters included five who suffered falls, a sign of how thin the margin for error was. Several athletes struggled to generate clean technical content, and some questioned surface quality during the competition. Malinin had earlier been part of a team gold earlier in the Games, but his individual free skate will be remembered as the night the "Quad God" became mortal.
For Shaidorov, the victory transforms him into a defining figure of these Games and raises Kazakhstan's profile in winter sport. For Malinin, the result is a watershed: a dominant run at the top of the sport has been interrupted, and questions about strategy, preparation and handling Olympic pressure will follow. Milan-Cortina 2026 reminded the skating world that on the Olympic stage, even the most technically formidable athletes can be undone by the narrowest of margins.
