MILAN — Even before Ilia Malinin took the ice Saturday night for his confrontational individual gala performance portraying the questions and doubts he harbored during the run-up to the Winter Olympics, he got one big hurdle out of the way.
He landed a quadruple jump — a relatively simple quad toe — as part of the U.S. gold-medal-winning team’s up-beat group exhibition number, then happily punched the air with his right fist.
Normally the act of landing a quad is so routine for the “Quad God” Malinin that it goes without a punctuation mark. But at these Olympic Games, eight days after he fell twice and stumbled across the ice in the men’s long program, dropping to eighth place, Malinin wasn’t taking anything for granted.
He landed another quad toe in his individual performance, and four backflips overall, and was warmly welcomed by the audience at the Milano Ice Skating Arena, which sent him off the ice with a sustained standing ovation when his gala number was over.
Malinin, 21, skated that performance to the music of his favorite artist, the rapper/singer NF, which features a question — ”Is this what you wanted?” — repeated multiple times. Malinin said he has been working on the exhibition number for a “few months,” meaning it was not designed as a specific response to his Olympic struggles.
‘This program was a very emotional piece,’ he said after he skated. ‘This message and this program and song really spoke to me and really represented how I’ve been feeling for the last year leading up to these Olympics. There’s been so much pressure, so much doubt, and everything around me: the noise, the media, the people, the environment, has been so overwhelming, being in this pressure of coming to the Olympics and having a good successful skate.
‘With what happened (here), I’m still very grateful to be here and I want to show to the world that we’re also human beings and we also have real thoughts, real feelings, even though it looks like we’re completely like robots, (with) super-human abilities, but in the end, deep inside, we’re still as similar as all of you.”
While striking a cautionary and at times foreboding tone in the week since his deeply disappointing long program, Malinin also has repeatedly said he “wouldn’t change a thing” about what he has gone through at these Games.
‘I learned so much from these Olympics,” he said, adding he is pleased to now have ‘one Olympics under my belt” so he can ‘understand what I can do differently and have even better strategy” for the next.
Let the record show that he was responsible for clinching the team title for the United States in a riveting, three-day quest for the first gold medal given out in figure skating at these Games. It was believed at the time that by skating both the short and long programs in the team event, Malinin was working through his nerves for what he hoped would be an exquisite men’s event. Obviously, that was not how things turned out.
Since then, he has been back to practicing and hanging out with his American teammates and other skaters in the Olympic Village, with some skating shows on the horizon in Switzerland before returning to his home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs to begin preparing to defend his title at next month’s world championships in Prague.
For all the doubts and concerns that he has, and that so many have about him, he ended one of his interviews in the Olympic mixed zone with a smile and a promise:
‘It’s not the last of me.”