How to Lose Like a Champion

SpiritedMichelle, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Ilia Malinan did not have the Olympics he’d hoped for. The world champion and overwhelming men's figure skating favorite headed into the games high on momentum and confidence. But from first ice, he was shaky. He ushered his fellow Americans to Team Gold, but it still wasn’t the Ilia anyone was expecting. He admitted as much, telling reporters that Olympic pressure was next-level. 

Then, when it came time for individual glory, the wheels really came off. 

He won the short program, despite not having a great skate. Days later, with the expectations of the entire world on his shoulders and Olympic greats like Simone Biles, Dorothy Hamill and Novak Djokovic in the crowd to witness figure skating history, the unthinkable happened. Needing only to do what he’s always done, he couldn’t. Not only did he not live up to his Quad God status, he fell. Twice. His confidence was shot. No one - not those in the stands, not the announcers, nor those of us at home - could process what we were all witnessing in real-time. Stunned silence gripped the arena.

On Ilia’s face, complete disbelief. Never in his life had he skated that poorly. Not only did he not take the gold, as expected, he didn’t even make the podium. He slid from first to eighth. It was a wholly unexpected, colossal collapse on the world’s biggest stage.

Did he play the blame game? He did not. In fact, the closest he came was while waiting for his scores when he turned to his dad and said, “They should have sent me to Beijing, then I wouldn’t have skated like this.” And he’s probably right. He didn’t make the team in 2022 and had he, the pressure to perform wouldn’t have been nearly as high - and he would have cut his teeth for 2026.

But the ‘what ifs’ mattered little at this moment. Walking away from the ‘Kiss and Cry,’ still numb from his public implosion, Ilia stopped to hug and congratulate the unlikely and equally numb winner - Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan - who had just pinched the gold medal that had, in theory, already been in Ilia’s pocket. And theirs wasn’t a perfunctory exchange. It was lengthy and by the looks of it, painfully legitimate. 

Next came the post-loss interviews. Something the athletes are happy to do when they win, but dread when they don’t. Did Ilia take this opportunity to blame the ice, the judges, the crowd, a lack of sleep, bad food… anything? Again, he did not. Instead, he told Andrea Joyce- and the millions who were watching - “I blew it.” 

“I was not expecting that, I felt like going into this competition I was so ready … maybe I was too confident that it was going to go well. … I think it was definitely mental, just now finally experiencing that Olympic atmosphere, it’s crazy, it’s not like any other competition, it’s really different. I’m still so grateful that I was able to put in this work and effort to get to where I am, but of course that was not the skate that I wanted.”

More interviews and more classy responses followed, even as Ilia was still coming to grips with a performance which, by many accounts, was the worst ever by a gold medal favorite. Kids - and adults - could learn a lot from this young man. He navigated a reality that was probably worse than his worst nightmare, and did so politely and with raw honesty and grace.

Moreover, he’s not a quitter. Ilia’s agent confirms that he’ll be defending his title at Worlds in Prague at the end of March. For reasons even better than his skating ability, we should all cheer him on.