Listen to this article with a free account
MILAN — Two days and 11 skaters into the figure skating team event, the United States’ gold medal hopes rested on just one final skater.
Ilia Malininwho, at just 21 years old, had already won a world championship and developed an ability to perform tricks that no other man in history had accomplished, had to recover from a trip that elicited gasps, then threw a backflip – his second in as many nights and in Olympic history – that elicited screams.
Then he had to wait for the last Japanese participant’s routine to finish.
It was nail-biting, nerve-wracking theater that ended with all the air sucked out of a once-raucous Milan ice skating arena as Shun Sato’s final score played over the stadium’s public address system. When he fell well short of Malinin’s score, seven American athletes who had competed in the team event hugged each other just feet from the ice.
The final score was 69 for the United States and 68 for Japan. Italy won the bronze medal with 60 points.
Malinin won his first career Olympic medal.
“I said to myself, ‘OK, I’m the deciding factor,'” Malinin said after the medal ceremony. “’I just have to, you know, do what I have to do.’”
It was the first medal awarded in figure skating at these Games and the second in a row. Olympic Games in which the United States won the event. To achieve this, the United States had to endure a two-day event combining scores from four different disciplines in Saturday’s qualifying rounds, and four more competitions in Sunday’s final.
The United States used the same teams in most events: Madison Chock and Evan Bates competed in both the rhythm and free dance; Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea competed in both days of pairs skating; and Malinin took care of the men’s singles. The only exception was the women’s singles skating, in which Alysa Liu was used on Saturday while Amber Glenn skated on Sunday.
Glenn, the three-time defending U.S. champion, said she felt “guilty” that her third-place finish knocked her out of the U.S. lead in the penultimate competition on Sunday and that she felt exhausted from training and unfamiliar with the format of the team event.
All of this left the United States and Japan tied for first, with 59 points, heading into Sunday’s final discipline, which began after 10 p.m. local time. If Malinin, a Fairfax, Va., native born for such a milestone — his parents skated in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics — was nervous, it didn’t show when he jumped on his skates and pumped his fist as he headed toward the ice during his pre-skate introduction. He unzipped a Team USA jacket to reveal a sparkly black top. The Japanese competitor, Sato, was more reserved.
“I wasn’t really thinking about whether or not I could beat Ilia,” Sato said through a translator, “but I really wanted to.”
Malinin may be figure skating’s biggest star, but he’s not invincible. Even despite that backflip, his Saturday routine was just good enough for a second behind the Japanese Yuma Kagiyama.
Malinin wasn’t perfect on Sunday either. He needed to get both hands on the ice to stabilize himself after a shaky fall, but he quickly increased the difficulty of his routine beyond anything his competitors could match by performing backflips at center ice. He left the routine by shouting towards the fans. His score of 200.03 easily put him in first place, more than 20 points ahead of the second-place Italian skater. And that set the bar for what Japan needed to win a gold medal.
Sato scored 194.86.
Andrew Greif is a sports reporter for NBC News Digital.
The associated press
contributed
.
