"Friday was the men's free skate, aka the long program (each individual skating event has a short and a long, the combined scores of which determine the podium). I fully expected to watch a razor-thin, nail-biting duel between Team USA's Ilia Malinin and Team Japan's Yuma Kagiyama-the kind that would come down to whether either of them slightly wobbled after landing a jump. Instead, it was basically stumble fucking city in that rink-with one unexpected exception."
"Malinin, our "Quad God," he of backflip fame and spoken-word music, entered as the heavy favorite. The technical base value of his program is so high that if everyone skated perfectly and he fell once, he still probably would have won gold. But he fell twice and also completely screwed up two of his seven quad jumps. It was one of the hardest things I've ever watched."
The men's free skate at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics produced unexpectedly dramatic results. A highly anticipated duel between Ilia Malinin and Yuma Kagiyama was expected to decide gold. Ilia Malinin entered as the heavy favorite because of an extremely high technical base value that included multiple quads and the unique quad axel. Malinin landed a gorgeous opening quad flip and a beautiful quad lutz but attempted the quad axel and bailed to a single axel, fell twice, and popped a quad loop to a double, severely undermining his medal chances.
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