Friday the Thirteenth. That’s all you need to know.
The men’s Olympic final was on this day of black cats, and blood moons, and things that go bump in the night.
Unfortunately, so many of the men went bump in the night.
But nobody, just nobody, even into the far corners of this earth, imagined that the Quad God, Ilia Malinin would be one of them.
Malinin, the young blond God who would win his events by 50-60 points or more, appeared unbeatable. Everybody wondered: “How do you defeat this guy?” He became the first to land seven clean quads at the Grand Prix Final a couple of months ago. He’s the first and only man to land a quad Axel in competition. His sheer unmatchable jumping power left everybody in the dust.
He could leave people speechless with his easy, lush rotations, coming at will. He threw an unplanned quad Axel in at the last minute in his free skate at the 2024 world championships in Montreal. One of his competitors once said they would never try a quad Axel because it might kill them.
Instead, as Malinin stuttered through his free skate on the day of bad omens – popping his quad Axel into a single (huge gasp heard around the world), turning a quad Salchow into a double, then falling on it, popping his quad loop into a double, falling on his second quad Lutz, losing more points because it was a repeated jump, not in combination – more than 70 points slipped through his fingers. Just like that. Gone.
Malinin finished the free skate with only 156.33 points, 42.31 points behind eventual gold medalist Mikhail Shaidorov, the mop-haired youth from Kazakhstan, with braces on his teeth and an exhibition routine that features a giant panda costume. (How could this be possible?) Not even Shaidorov could believe it. That score put the American in 15th place in the free skate, 8th overall. People gasped everywhere. Everywhere.
Heavily favoured for gold. No medal at all.
Malinin’s technical score of 76.61 was lower than that of Yu-Hsiang of Taiwan, who skated in the first group and was 21st at the Games.
Apparently, the No. 13 is considered lucky in Kazakhstan. Shaidorov, who put on a jumping clinic, had a crazy high technical score of 114.68, almost twice that of Malinin. He’s the only man to do a triple Axel – Euler – quad Salchow series ( and another similar jump combo, with quad on the back half), and it was long and big and luscious as it travelled part of the way down one side of the rink and all around the end. He’s the only guy to do a quad as the second jump in a combo. Shaidorov got 21.39 points for that element alone. He won the free skate with 198.64 points. His total score was 291.58, winning by 11 points over Yuma Kagiyama.
When Shaidorov finished second to Malinin at the world championships last year, he was 31.09 points behind him. That wasn’t bad, actually.
Malinin holds the world record for the highest free skate score of 238.24, set at the Grand Prix Final in December. However, 2022 Olympic champion Nathan Chen still holds the world record of 113.97 for the short program and 335.30 for the total score.
Malinin’s free skate score at the Olympics was 81.91 points lower than his world record.
Meanwhile, Canadian champ Stephen Gogolev was one of the few who wasn’t spooked at all by what day it was. This season, it is as if Gogolev has been emerging from a long sleep, with every competition better than the one before. A child prodigy, who was the first Canadian man to land a quad Lutz in a competition at age 14. But injuries and a growth spurt (He’s now a lanky 6-1) derailed him to the point of considering retirement.
But he didn’t quit. At the Canadian championships in January, he raised eyebrows with a dynamic short program that led to his overall win and the only Olympic spot for Canadian men. With every successful result, he gained more confident. At the Olympics, he came out with confidence, and left no doubt that he would land big jumps. It was his best performance of the year. His short program, too, where he plays the role of a bank robber stealing all the cash. On Friday the 13th, he almost did that.
Gogolev said that at his first Olympics, he had no expectations of where he would finish, although he thought if he skated well, he could be in the top 10. In another interview, it became the top 8. Perhaps. His scores had suggested such.
In the short program, he did finish 10th. But the day of wolves howling at the moon, Gogolev surpassed all expectations by finishing second in the free skate and fifth overall. Canada was agog. Canada hadn’t seen a man as successful as him since Patrick Chan in 2018.
With three clean quads, two triple Axels, both in either a series or a combination, and some level four spins and steps – previously a weakness – Gogolev earned 186.37 for the free, 13.27 points behind Shaidorov and only .17 points ahead of Shun Sato, who won the bronze medal.
Gogolev’s total score of 273.78 was only 1.12 points away from the bronze medal. Gogolev cracked a smile and raised both fists in the kiss and cry. He had been 15th to skate out of 24 men, so as he sat, he watched his placement rise with every skater who made a bobble. And there were many.
Gogolev’s total score was.9.29 points higher than that of Malinin, who had won the short program. His free skate score was higher by 30.04 points than Malinin’s.
There is also a growing indignation about Korean Junwhan Cha, who finished fourth, about a point away from a bronze medal. He had been sixth after a stellar skate in the short program, one of few men to bind technical abilities (the landing of his quad Salchow is light as a feather, and a big jump), with artistic sensitivities. He has the best Ina Bauer in the business and footwork that sings. With only about 92 points, he seemed underscored.
Cha says what he needs now is rest, after having battled injuries and boot problems for the past couple of seasons. He has said that every time he puts on his skates, he feels pain. He had to be medicated in order to skate. So now he wants to tell himself: “It’s been hard. Let’s rest.”
A similarity between Gogolev and Cha: both trained under Brian Orser in Toronto from a young age, and because they did , they have good skating skills. Not all of the men skating at the Olympics did.
But under the weight of the Olympics, men sprawled across the ice in increasing numbers. Yuma Kagiyama, considered the epitome of a skater who combined quads with sparkling artistic personality, finished only sixth in the free skate (he had defeated Malinin by 10 points in the team short program event), stepped out of a quad Salchow, fell on a quad flip, dragged a foot out of a quad toe loop Still, he did enough to take the silver medal, 11.52 points behind Shaidorov.
Kagiyama’s countryman, Shun Sato, who had wept, thinking he had caused a loss of the gold medal for Japan in the team event, wept again after his short program finish of only ninth. But he rose to the occasion in the free skate, landing a quad Lutz, and two quad toe loops, had only a wobble on a triple Lutz and finished third in the free skate to take the bronze medal.
Another victim of sinister black crow chicanery: Adam Siao Him Fa of France, third after the short program with a stunning routine that took artistry to new heights, fumbled completely in the free skate to finish twelfth, and seventh overall. He was angry and frustrated with himself. Not pleased at all. He fell on a quad Lutz that was slightly under rotated, stumbled out of a quad toe loop, and flipped out of a quad Salchow.
Perhaps part of the issue was ice conditions that were less than ideal at the Milan rink. Cha noted after his short program that the ice was soft and wet – which he doesn’t prefer. He said that when a skater lands a jump, the ice that bounces off, freezes and becomes like a “bump.” Other skaters seem to catch a blade, too. Replays showed that Kagiyama’s blade caught on something on the ice during the fall on his quad flip.
The short track speed skaters, who share the rink, also complained of soft ice.
Malinin’s take on his performance, ice or not: “I blew it.”
He quickly congratulated Shaidorov on the win and answered every media question with candour.
“I told Ilia after his performance that it was incredible to skate on the same ice with him,” Shaidorov said. “And he told me that I deserved the victory.”
The next day, the New York Times scrawled a huge headline of “Quad God Falls” with a photo of him sprawled on the ice, across the entire front of the sports section. There is no bigger arena than the Olympics, and Malinin had crashed with all eyes watching.
And therein lay much of his problem. Before the Olympics, he had been touted as a certain gold medal for the United States. There were photo shoots of him modelling clothes. There were sponsorship functions. The Olympics is such, that if you are a star like Malinin, everybody wants a piece of you. And every move you make is multiplied by 1,000. During the free skate, especially after he singled his signature jump, the quad Axel, Malinin lost his way. He knew he didn’t need it to win, but marbles began to drop.
He wasn’t at his best for the team event. He competed both part but the cracks were showing. At the last minute, his team flew in his sometime coach Rafael Arutunian, getting him an emergency accreditation to shore him up for the individual event. Malinin practiced sometimes away from the main rink, instead going to nearby Bergamo, away from the noise.
“The pressure of the Olympics is really something different,” he told an NBC reporter. “Not a lot of people will understand that from our side.”
He said he felt confident going into the free skate. His early practice went well. He thought he was ready.
But it all unraveled beneath his feet. “It really went by so fast, I didn’t have time to process what really went down,” he said.
But he did have a weird feeling going into the long program. So many thoughts flooded his mind just before he got to his starting point. “I think it almost overwhelmed me a little,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot in my life, a lot of bad and good.” (?????)
But it was the pressure of being a gold medal favorite, he said. “It’s just something I can’t control now,” he said.
As for Shaidorov, he came into the Olympics under the radar, not having the best season of his life after taking the silver medal at the 2025 world championships. He admitted that the medal added a new pressure and he was mentally adjusting to it.
Shaidorov is an unlikely Olympic champion, but then his forebear Denis Ten was too, having started to skate in a rink at a mall in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan isn’t a powerful nation in figure skating. They don’t have facilities or support. Forget the team doctor. Still, Ten became a popular 2014 Olympic bronze medalist with his quads and his artistic skating. But sadly, he was murdered by a couple of thieves trying to plunder his car mirrors in Almaty. Ten was only 25 when he died in July of 2018. The nation mourned. His funeral was large and public.
Although Ten trained in the United States, he was ultimately so connected to his home country of Kazakhstan that he turned to a native son, classically trained musician Dimash Qudaibergen, for his rendition of “SOS d’un terrien en detresse” – and he used this music to win his Olympic medal. Qudaibergen, who is still only 31 years old, has an unusually wide vocal range of six octaves and two semi-tones. He can hit a high note of D8, beyond the highest note of a piano. Like Madonna or Lady Gaga, the singer is known simply as Dimash. The rest of his name is actually quite complicated.
Shaidorov had always wanted to skate to Dimash as well, so this year he chose his “Confessa: The Diva Dance.” Thus, following in Ten’s footsteps with his music choice, Shaidorov became only the seventh skater to win an Olympic title at his first attempt. Ten would have been proud, that his work more than a decade ago, was bearing fruit.
Dimash was pleased that Shaidorov used his music: completely different from other skaters who have had headaches trying to secure the rights to use music at these Olympics. So when Shaidorov won gold, Dimash contacted him and told him he would give him a car.
A car dealer in Almaty is also going to gift Shaidorov’s father, Stanislav, a figure skating teacher, a luxury Audi Q8, because he heard the stories of how the man had to sell his car to pay for his son’s skating expenses. Others are offering up goodies, too.
Since his win, Shaidorov has barely slept. He grins with his braces when he walks through a metal detector at the Olympics, sounds off the alarm, and opens his coat to display the medal. It’s Kazakhstan’s first Winter Olympic gold medal in 32 years, since a cross-country skier took gold. So far, no other Kazakhstan athlete has won gold in Milan.
It’s a rarity indeed. But for this Olympics, the Kazakhstan government promised $250,000 (U.S.) to any athlete to win gold – and an apartment. Shaidorov’s life has changed.
Shaidorov’s coach, Alexei Urmanov won the 1994 Olympics title in his second appearance, and at age 21 – same age as Shaidorov – was a bit of a surprise winner, having had to go up against returning pros like Brian Boitano and Victor Petrenko, who nonetheless hadn’t skated in six years. Now, Urmanov’s hair is grey, his eyes twinkle mischievously, and he is always found looking over his glasses.
He has been Shaidorov’s guiding light since the kid was 14. The year before, Shaidorov had been landing only double Axels. Now he’s a bit of a Quad King himself, if not a god.
Shaidorov was not only inspired by Ten, but he became passionate about the sport after watching the 2015-2016 skating events, and catching sight of Yuzuru Hanyu skating with beauty, landing difficult quads as if they were easy, and breaking world records.
“He is and always will be a big idol for me,” Shaidorov said. “His skating, his movements, his jumps and his way of thinking. He is a skater. I have always looked up to him in everything. I am still trying to learn from him and he remains my biggest role model.”
And so is the Kung Fu Panda. Shaidorov has made a name for himself by skating exhibitions dressed in a large, bulky Kung Fu panda suit. Amazingly enough, he can do a triple toe loop in it. No one has figured out how he packs this thing to go on the road.
Shaidorov, shy and likeably awkward, finds parallels between himself and the Kung Fu Panda. Both are clumsy, he said. But the message has been, even if you are clumsy, you can still become a Dragon. “Nothing is impossible,” Shaidorov says.
It’s as crazy as a Halloween party. On Friday the 13th.
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