Winter Olympics: Ilia Malinin goes for second figure-skating gold – live

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Risk and reward

Malinin can surely win with a solid program that doesn’t include the quadruple axel.

If you were Malinin, would you attempt it?

Me, no – I can’t even skate backwards. But it’s not just a function of physical ability here. It’s a question of what you can handle mentally or emotionally, and it’s a question of what you want to accomplish.

If we’re all guessing, we’d have to say Malinin will go for it because he doesn’t just want gold. He wants to make history. He wants to skate over to the kiss and cry this evening knowing that he has just done things no one has seen in the Olympics.

Years of training that come down a moment. But would he want to walk away wondering “What if?”

And he might even throw a backflip for good measure – legal but not something isn’t even graded as a technical element.

Ilia Malinin eyes the landing on his backflip in the short program. Photograph: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images

So you want to be a heavily favored Olympian ...

Second, I’ve long thought that one of the saddest things that can happen in the Olympics is to see someone who has dominated for three years somehow lose it on the sport’s biggest stage – and in the case of far too many people, the only stage on which they’re seen at all.

The risk of such a loss in worse in some sports than in others. When Usain Bolt was at the starting line for a race, he knew that he was simply faster than everyone else there, and nothing could stop him getting gold aside from a catastrophic problem getting out of the starting blocks. Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky were never going to leave the Olympics empty-handed, in part because they had several individual races to attempt.

And in a lot of sports, athletes can afford one or two errors. Rachel Homan’s Canadian curling team had an uncharacteristic bushel of inaccurate shots in a loss to the USA today, but that’s just one game in the round robin. The Soviet Union hockey team didn’t lose to the USA in 1980 because of one play; the USA had to generate offense through about three-fourths of the game and then hold on as the Soviets fired away at Jim Craig’s goal. (And the USA still almost handed back the advantage, trailing in their last game before rallying.)

Also, the outcome may sometimes be out of the athletes’ hands. No one will ever offer an air-tight defense of the decision to give Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron the ice dancing gold medal, and all Madison Chock and Evan Bates can do is walk away knowing that they skated as well as they could possibly skate. (Yes, in case you don’t follow US media and have been wondering – people in this country are not very happy about that decision.)

But sometimes, injuries can strike at the wrong time, as they did to Lindsey Vonn multiple times. Or a skate edge can lose the millimeter of grip it has on the ice. Or a turn of the skis can be an inch away from where it needs to be. In the worst case, consider Mikaela Shiffrin, who overcompensated for her DNFs in Beijing by going out too slowly in the team event here, and all but the most hard-hearted people will be holding their breaths when the GOAT next races.

Malinin has done incomprehensible things in the sport. He’s the only person to land a quadruple axel in competition, and he’s done it more than a dozen times. But does he have that elusive mix of confidence and calmness to do it when the whole world is watching?

The conventional wisdom before the Olympics was that he could afford a couple of bobbles and still win because the jumps that he attempts are on a different plane from most skaters. But he was beaten in the team event short program, and his margin in the team event long program and the individual event’s short program has been considerably closer than most people figured. He’ll be under immense pressure today from Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama.

So join us this afternoon as we watch 24 outstanding skaters trying to show their best when we’re all watching. And for the last of them, Malinin, hold your breath with everyone else.

Beau will be here shortly. In the meantime, here’s how the team event went:

The United States held off a late charge from Japan to retain the Olympic team figure skating title on Sunday, with Ilia Malinin delivering in the men’s free skate to secure gold after three days of competition. Japan finished with silver, while host nation Italy claimed bronze.

The United States survived a final-day surge from Japan to retain the Olympic team figure skating title on Sunday night, with Ilia Malinin delivering under intense pressure in the men’s free skate to secure gold at the Milano Cortina Games. Japan finished one point behind in silver, while host nation Italy claimed bronze after three days of tightly contested competition.

The final standings – 69 points for the United States, 68 for Japan and 60 for Italy – reflected just how narrow the margin was in one of the most dramatic Olympic team events since the format was introduced in 2014. What had begun as a comfortable American lead after two days turned into a head-to-head showdown in the final session, ultimately decided by the sport’s most technically ambitious skater.

American hopes had rested heavily on Malinin, the 21-year-old two-time world champion who has gone more than two years without losing a competition. But he entered the decisive free skate carrying unusual pressure after a below-par short program on Saturday left the defending champions vulnerable. When Japan erased the remaining US cushion earlier Sunday, the outcome effectively came down to Malinin versus Japan’s Shun Sato in the final discipline.

You can read the full report below: