"The teenager cried that morning. She called her parents after the six-minute warmup and said she couldn't do it. Her legs were physically shaking in her beginning pose. She didn't know what to do. "When you go to the Olympics, there's no training for that," said Lipinski, now an analyst for NBC. "You don't know what it's going to feel like 'til you're actually feeling it.""
"The 21-year-old dubbed " the Quad God " was supposed to unleash the first quadruple axel in Olympic history. The four-and-a-half twisting jump he successfully executed when he was 17 has been the talk of the Olympic cycle. Battling nerves and the conditioning needed for a long Olympic competition, he didn't use it during the team competition or his individual short program."
Ilia Malinin, a 21-year-old figure skater renowned for his quadruple jumps, experienced a dramatic collapse from favorite to eighth place in Milan. High expectations centered on his potential to land the first quadruple axel in Olympic competition, a jump previously completed at age 17. Intense nerves and the endurance demands of long Olympic-format events limited his use of the jump earlier in the competition, leaving the free skate as the final chance. Pressure manifested midprogram, causing a midair bailout and a cascade of errors. Tara Lipinski described the unique, untrainable nature of Olympic pressure and recalled her own paralytic fear before the 1998 free skate.
Read at Los Angeles Times
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