They’ll Make a Miniseries About Men’s Figure Skating at the 2026 Olympics Someday

The 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics still have a lock on the most Shakespearean figure skating plot of all time for the post-attack showdown between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. But if some future screenwriter is hunting for an emotional sports saga, complete with hubris, heartbreak, glory, history-making moments, and minions, they need look no further than the men’s figure skating final at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. Because damn, I did not see any of this coming. 

Friday was the men’s free skate, aka the long program (each individual skating event has a short and a long, the combined scores of which determine the podium). I fully expected to watch a razor-thin, nail-biting duel between Team USA’s Ilia Malinin and Team Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama—the kind that would come down to whether either of them slightly wobbled after landing a jump. Instead, it was basically stumble fucking city in that rink—with one unexpected exception. 

Malinin, our “Quad God,” he of backflip fame and spoken-word music, entered as the heavy favorite. The technical base value of his program is so high that if everyone skated perfectly and he fell once, he still probably would have won gold. But he fell twice and also completely screwed up two of his seven quad jumps. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever watched. 

His opening quad flip? Gorgeous. Powerful. Off to a gold-medal start. Then came the quad axel—the move that separates him from the rest of the planet. He’s the only skater in the world to ever land it in competition (the 4 1/2 rotations were once thought impossible for a human to achieve), but he had yet to attempt it at these Olympics. He seemed to finally go for it—but very clearly fully psyched himself out mid-air. He bailed, completing only a single axel. A full technical implosion in real time. I literally looked away. 

Then, despite bouncing back to land a beautiful quad lutz, he popped his loop from a quad to a double. At this level, it’s almost more shocking to watch someone flub two jumps than to fall on a landing. And then he fell. Then he fell again. Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir were literally too stunned to speak.

He still landed the backflip—a signature and spiritually stunning trick, but technically useless. He finished eighth. Eighth. I wanted to give him a hug and apologize for initially writing that he should thank the Olympic stumble gods for making Kagiyama stumble during the short program. 

“I blew it,” he said after, per USA Today. “I just felt like all the … traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there were just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there. And I just did not handle it.” Head up, babyboy. He’s 21 and will for sure be back at the 2030 Olympics. Who knows! Maybe he’ll be a Quint God by then. 

Kagiyama, fresh off a near-flawless short program on Tuesday that had him radiating joy, looked like a different skater entirely. He stumbled, fell, and looked stressed out of his mind the entire time; my shoulders still feel tense from watching him for six minutes three days ago. He still won silver, which is huge, of course, but he did not come to these Olympics for a second silver medal—and looked gutted when his score flashed. 

Which means we got a wildcard at the top of the podium—which is always lovely to watch. Even though he was only fifth going into Friday’s free skate, Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov won gold. He nailed every single jump, including a triple axel+quad salchow combination that no other skater has ever landed. He collapsed onto the ice at the end of his performance in pure relief and elation—and then stood atop the podium to receive Kazakhstan’s first-ever Olympic medal in figure skating—and the country’s first Winter Olympic medal since 1994. All roads lead back to Lillehammer.

In a sport where one wobble can cost you everything, the only thing guaranteed is that nothing is. Coming to HBO. Spring 2040. 

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