"For nearly three years, Malinin had been men's skating's guiding light: unbeaten since late 2023, winner of back-to-back world titles, the skater who recalibrated the sport's technical ceiling and then made winning look procedural. He arrived at the Milano Ice Skating Arena leading by more than five points after the short program and carrying the most difficult planned program in the field. Under almost any normal competitive logic, that combination should have been decisive."
"What made the result feel even closer to inevitable was what happened around him. One by one, the contenders who could realistically threaten him faltered. Italy's Daniel Grassl fell out of podium contention. France's Adam Siao Him Fa lost ground. Several skaters struggled to generate clean technical content on ice. (Some athletes have privately questioned its quality.) By the time Malinin took the stage at 10.48pm local time, the event had effectively opened for him."
"That makes what followed over the next seven minutes so difficult to process. The official result eighth place overall after entering the free skate with a five-point lead only tells part of the story. The deeper explanation sits inside the scoring sheet: the collapse of base value, the loss of combination opportunities and the cascading technical penalties that follow when one missed element forces a skater to improvise a program designed to be executed, not adjusted."
Ilia Malinin entered the free skate at the Milano Ice Skating Arena with a more-than-five-point lead and the most difficult planned program in the field. Several realistic challengers faltered beforehand, leaving the event effectively open to him. During the seven-minute free skate, missed elements triggered a collapse of base value, the loss of combination opportunities and cascading technical penalties when improvisation replaced planned execution. Those technical failures transformed a commanding lead into an eighth-place finish. The outcome illustrates how modern figure skating scoring can rapidly and harshly punish single mistakes, even for the era's leading technical jumper.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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