Spoiler Alert: A famous US athlete just crashed and burned. Caution!

Trust me. Don't watch this tonight. You don't need this type of depression. Failure is contagious. View and your literally asking to screw something up this weekend.

Walk the f-ck away.

The ‘Quad God’ Crashes to Earth and Misses the Podium in Stunning Olympic Upset

Ilia Malinin, a heavy favorite for gold, delivered one of the worst performances of his career and slipped all the way to eighth.

By Ben Cohen and Louise Radnofsky, WSJ

Updated Feb. 13, 2026

American figure skater Ilia Malinin, the “quad god,” fell from first to eighth place in the free skate, missing the podium.

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MILAN—The man known as the “quad god” took the Olympic ice on Friday night, hoping to leave known as the figure skating GOAT.

For years, Ilia Malinin had dominated the sport. As he removed his warmup jacket and revealed a costume with gold sequins, the 21-year-old American had such a towering reputation that he was five minutes away from being in the conversation as the greatest of all time.

Five minutes later, he was in tears after the single worst skate of his entire career.

Looking suddenly mortal, Malinin botched his famed axel, abandoned another two of his quadruple jump attempts, fell twice—and, in the most stunning twist of the Winter Olympics, missed the podium altogether.

It was such a disastrous performance that Malinin slipped from first place all the way down to eighth. For the two-time reigning world champion who hadn’t lost any competition in several years, it was a near-total collapse.

As he tried to wrap his mind around the unthinkable, Malinin admitted that he felt overwhelmed by the pressure of the Olympics, where figure skaters have long found the ice to be especially slippery. He was even caught by cameras saying he would have skated better in Milan if he had been selected for the U.S. team in Beijing four years ago instead of being left home. Then, perhaps, he would have banished the nerves of a first trip to the Games once and for all.

When the scores came in and the monumental upset became official, Malinin was booted from the top of the podium by Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov. The unexpected Olympic gold medalist was flanked by two Japanese skaters who had become more accustomed to staring up at Malinin.

“I was not expecting that,” Malinin said, “going into this competition.”

In fact, this competition was supposed to be more of a coronation. Since the last Olympics, the backflipping sensation had lorded over figure skating. In 2022, he grabbed the sport’s holy grail and became the first and only person ever to land a quadruple axel in competition. From that moment on, he was the frontrunner for the 2026 Olympic title. By the time he landed in Italy, Malinin was the prohibitive favorite to win the one title he didn’t already own.

Even other Olympians assumed they were battling for second place.

“It’s unbelievable to be sharing the same ice as him,” said Shaidorov, the gold medalist.

So when Malinin fell apart during his free program on Friday night, fans sitting by the rink were asking the same question as those watching thousands of miles away: What happened?

Was it something wrong with the ice? Was it the crazy difficulty of spinning around in the air four times at ridiculous speeds? Was it suddenly running headfirst into the limits of physics? Or was it simply nerves?

Plenty of athletes have come to their first Games virtually undefeated and seemingly invincible, only to be completely rattled by the sight of five rings.

And in his first time on Olympic ice last weekend, it was clear that Malinin could well join them. He had a shaky short program in the team event and had to scramble the next day to clinch gold for the U.S. When he led after the first half of the individual competition, he looked as if he had figured out a way to skate past the wobbles.

So as he stepped up to the sport’s biggest stage, Malinin was on track for gold. But from the moment he took his starting pose, he was shaken. His brain flooded, he said, with negative thoughts and “all the just traumatic moments of my life.”

Despite the jitters, he managed to land his first quad. But a split-second after he set up for the axel, he bailed out. He didn’t deliver the four-and-a-half rotations that would have melted the crowd. He didn’t even make it around twice.

And it all went downhill from there.

He opened up too early on his loop. He fell on his second quadruple lutz, making it impossible to tack on a high-scoring sequence of additional jumps. He couldn’t complete his salchow—and then he fell on the landing of that one, too. Just about the only element that Malinin pulled off as intended was his backflip.

“I blew it,” he said afterward. “There’s no way that just happened.”

As he tried to make sense of what just happened, he sat in the kiss-and-cry box, searching for explanations as he waited for a score that he knew would be shockingly low.

“They should have sent me to Beijing,” he told his father, who is also his coach. “Then I wouldn’t have skated like that.”