MILAN – Ilia Malinin wound his way through the tunnels beneath the Milano Ice Skating Aren, trying in vain to explain – or even just understand – exactly what went wrong in an Olympic free skate that could only be described as a disaster.
Out in the arena, Mikhail Shaidorov was taking a victory lap wearing the gold medal everyone expected the American to win.
And playing over the loudspeakers: Coldplay´s song “Viva La Vida,” and the lyrics that begin, “I used to rule the world .”
In one of the biggest upsets in figure skating history, Malinin fell twice and made several other glaring mistakes, sending the “Quad God” tumbling all the way off the podium and leaving a star-studded crowd in stunned silence.
And that cleared the way for Shaidorov, the mercurial but talented jumping dynamo from Kazakhstan, to claim the first gold medal for his nation at these Winter Games.
“Honestly, I still haven’t been able to process what just happened,” Malinin said according to AP.
“I mean, going into this competition, I felt really good this whole day. Feeling really solid. I just thought that all I needed to do was trust the process that I´ve always been doing.
“But it´s not like any other competition. It´s the Olympics,” he added, “and I think people (don´t) realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen from the inside. So, it was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like just I had no control.”
Out of control is a good way to summarize the performance.
The 21-year-old Shaidorov finished with a career-best 291.58 points, while Yuma Kagiyama earned his second consecutive Olympic silver medal and Japanese teammate Shun Sato took bronze.
Then there was Malinin, also 21, who dropped all the way to eighth. The two-time world champion finished with 264.49 points, his worst total score in nearly four years, and one that ended a two-plus year unbeaten streak covering 14 full competitions.
