"Throughout these Winter Olympics, the surest bet in Milan was that American figure skater Ilia Malinin, the vaunted "Quad God," would dominate the men's individual figure-skating contest and bring home Olympic gold. But when Malinin took the ice on Friday-and there's no other way to say this-he choked. And instead of the Olympic coronation we had all banked on, the figure-skating gold went to... some 21-year-old from Kazakhstan who still has braces on his teeth?"
"It's safe to say that Mikhail Shaidorov is the 2026 Olympic gold medalist is a sentence that nobody expected to hear this February. Probably not even Mikhail Shaidorov! After all, Malinin's skill with the death-defying quadruple axel-he is the only skater to ever land one in competition-has upended the sport and arguably remade it in his own image. While Shaidorov is a masterful technician on the ice, he doesn't have a quad axel in his arsenal,"
Mikhail Shaidorov, a 21-year-old Kazakh skater, won Olympic men's figure-skating gold after Ilia Malinin, the sport's dominant 'Quad God,' faltered during his program. Malinin's unprecedented quadruple axel has reshaped competitive expectations, but a mistake on the Olympic stage opened the door for Shaidorov. Shaidorov lacks a quad axel and still needs polish in presentation, yet delivered a technically strong performance that capitalized on the upset. Experts had projected Shaidorov's peak around 2030, making the 2026 victory unexpected. The outcome underscores how underdogs can prevail and marks Kazakhstan's second-ever Winter Olympic gold.
Read at Slate Magazine
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