When a star athlete delivers a poor performance while the world is watching on the Olympic stage, it’s a challenge to move forward.
But Ilia Malinin, Team USA’s favorite for a gold medal, doesn’t want to dwell on the past after he failed to make it to the podium, finishing eighth in the individual men’s event at the Milano Cortina Winter Games.
“Everything happens for a reason,” the 21-year-old told CBS News in an interview Wednesday and said he has to believe that “you learn a lot more from failure than you do winning.”
Malinin stressed he was focused on moving forward and continuing to push the boundaries of the sport. Even though he failed to perform his signature quadruple axel in the free skate portion of the competition, Malinin said he is still going to try to increase the number and difficulty level of his jumps.
“I think I would be much better to be known as ‘Quad God,’ as you say, rather than winning gold medal,” Malinin said. He said even though he was emotional after the devastating performance, he wasn’t going to dwell on the past.
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Malinin merely had to deliver a mediocre performance to add individual gold to the gold medal he won in the team event. Instead, Olympic stress and pressure led to a flawed performance during the individual competition last Friday. He said he hopes people learn from watching him fall multiple times during his performance and realize more about the sport’s complexity.
“In the end, it’s really hard, physically, mentally, emotionally, there’s so much that goes into this sport, and the people don’t really realize what’s happening,” Malinin said.
The first-time Olympian said that he also hopes people relate to what he went through and understand he had “a bad day in his life,” and “people go through good days and bad days,” Malinin said.
Malinin has said he will compete in the 2026 World Figure Skating Championships, which are taking place next month in Prague.
“You have to get up and skate the next day,” he said.
