Malinin melts down, finishes 8th after disastrous free skate

MILAN — In the biggest meltdown in figure skating history, perhaps Olympic history, the Quad God on the biggest night of his career was a mere mortal.

Ilia Malinin, the two-time World champion and one of the biggest favorites of the Milano Cortina Olympic Games, had a complete meltdown in the men’s free skate Friday night, finishing eighth.

Malinin fell twice and generally stumbled through a tentative and hesitant routine.

Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan posted a career-best 291.58 points and gave Kazakhstan its first Winter Games gold medal.

“I blew it,” Malinin said. “That’s honestly the first thing that came to my mind.”

Malinin finished with 264.49 points, ending a two-plus year unbeaten streak that covered 14 full competitions.

“Honestly, yeah, I was not expecting that,” Malinin said. “I felt going into this competition, I was so ready. I just felt ready going on that ice. I think maybe that might have been the reason, is I was too confident it was going to go well.”

The performance might haunt Malinin for the rest of his career.

He opened with a quad flip, one of a record-tying seven in his planned program, then appeared to be going after the quad axel only he has ever landed in competition, but had to bail out. He recovered to land a quad lutz — and then the problems really began.

Malinin only doubled a planned quad loop, throwing his timing off. He fell on a quad lutz, preventing him from doing the second half of the quad lutz-triple toe loop combination that would have earned him big points. And in his final jumping pass, which was supposed to be a high-scoring quad salchow-triple axel, Malinin only could muster a double salchow — and he fell on that.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. This story will be updated.

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