Fall of the Quad God: Ilia Malinin finds he is all too human under the Olympic spotlight

"By the time Ilia Malinin reached the closing stretch of his Olympic free skate, the outcome was no longer really the story. The story was the expression on his face not panic, not shock, but the dawning realization that a destiny he had controlled for nearly three years had slipped beyond his reach in the blinding span of four and a half catastrophic minutes."

"For the rising generation of men's skaters, the 21-year-old Malinin has existed less as a rival than as a moving technical horizon. The Quad God. The skater who built programs around jumps others still treated as theory, who pushed the sport into something closer to applied physics. Much like Simone Biles, who took in Friday's contest from the arena's VIP seats, his only competition was himself. The three-year unbeaten run that stretched back through 14 competitions was only the baseline of the Malinin mythos."

"Malinin sat only feet away while Japan's Yuma Kagiyama volunteered an extraordinary confession to reporters: If we both perform at 100% of our ability, I don't think that I will be able to win. On Friday, as Kagiyama repeated the Olympic silver he won in Beijing despite an error-strewn performance of his own, Malinin did not simply lose gold. He lost the version of himself that had made losing feel almost abstract."

Ilia Malinin entered the closing stretch of his Olympic free skate with a dawning realization that a destiny he had controlled for nearly three years had slipped beyond his reach in four and a half catastrophic minutes. He had served as a technical horizon for a rising generation, the "Quad God" who built programs around jumps others treated as theory and pushed the sport toward applied physics. He had been his own rival, riding a three-year, 14-competition unbeaten run. On Friday he finished eighth, as a popped axel, a botched combination and a clattering fall caused the program to disintegrate into chaos.

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