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Ilia has been crying out for help for longer than he’d care to admit.
At first, it was subtle. As subtle as he could be. A hint to his dad that he was overwhelmed. A waver of insecurity in a practice where he was being watched.
It was at the dinner table, where he would bring up his concerns over his programme, and he’d mention his nerves over his next competition.
Dismissed.
Perhaps he was too subtle. Perhaps they didn’t want to focus on it. He couldn’t be sure. Those meals went by with little more than a minor acknowledgement. “You’ll do fine. You’ve won so far, and you’ve kept up your practice.”
It was true. He’d been winning consistently; despite the nerves, the fear, the clawing insecurity that felt like it was crawling up his body. Ilia Manilin had too much riding on every competition to crack.
You would think that it would be the opposite. Every competition was more proof of his talent; it was another demonstration that he was pushing forward innovation in the sport.
But it only raised the expectation. Every passing competition with a winning score meant that there was more and more to lose. If he failed, it was just a harder crash to the bottom, and the pressure that should've lessened as he proved himself as an athlete only became worse and worse.
It was easier when he was younger. He was an underdog; every success was more of a shock to the media than it was an anticipated win. There was only pressure to improve to get to somewhere that he could be a fierce competitor. Now, he was all of that and more.
If he failed now, he’d fuck up everything. Who would ever care what he did if he couldn’t prove himself consistently? He had to become the best. No one would accept anything other than the best. Not his country, not his fans, not his state, his university, his fans, his friends, not his parents, and certainly not himself.
Ilia Manilin is the Quad God. He was the first one to give himself the name. Maybe, distantly, he understood that to be true. He told the media that it was true all the time; that he was the Quad God because he was the only man to complete a quad axel in competition.
This was a major accomplishment. People told him so all the time. It didn’t feel major to him at all. If he told the media enough about the nickname, maybe if they called him the Quad God enough, maybe it would finally boost his confidence.
This must’ve been the plan that he came up with when he was still trying to convince himself that if he could garner enough support, he’d finally be convinced of how hard he worked. Now, it curses him more than anything.
He’s not mythical. He’s not a God. He was foolish to ever say he was one, and the media was foolish to run with it.
He’s posturing. He’s a poser in everything he does. He’s not confident, he’s not the quad god, he’s not the most technical skater, he’s not impressive, he’s not notable, he’s not anything at all.
And yet, somehow, it’s everything.
He is nothing in figure skating, and nothing without it.
His pleas grew louder before he was even nearing the Olympic ice. His programmes may exude self-confidence, but it’s the only place he has it. It’s in comments more blunt during practice, a popped quad axel that he steps out of, and he shakes his head on the ice, swearing that it’s too important.
It’s extra hours on the ice, beyond what is necessary. It’s launching himself at quints that he can’t quite catch, careening into the ice and slamming a fist into it.
“I’m not enough.”
It falls out after one of them, the suffocating eyes of his dad watching him.
Maybe it was an accident, or it was the first of his many more direct attempts. His dad skates over, looks down over his heaving body.
“It was enough turn speed, it’s just the height is off.”
God, Ilia wishes it were just about the stupid quint.
Social media calls him cocky and arrogant. Maybe he’s on it more than he needs to be. His brain lets him believe this to be true.
They’re right. He’s cocky. He has no right to be. He is nothing. How could he ever act so entitled on the ice when he’ll never reach the greats? He’s no Yuzuru Hanyu and certainly no Evgeni Plushenko. What did he even have to brag about? A great technical score? Good jumps? They're only there to make up for his sheer lack of artistry.
That’s what his father and mother always point out to him; it’s what the critics always say. He has no artistry at all; he doesn’t try to bring any emotion. He’s a sportsman, with no show, and that’s the most important part.
Perhaps his final claim to fame will be the cocky man who drove figure skating down a path of artistic nightmares in the cloying need for bragging rights over who can land what quickest.
Ilia Manilin gets into his head. So much so that sometimes he feels like he can’t breathe at all. He lies at night in his bed and stares at the ceiling, wondering who could ever care.
He has friends, friends he doesn’t see nearly often enough, because he’s too busy competing. Friends who beg him to do normal college things that he turns down are called a buzzkill. Friends who probably only want to be friends with him so they can brag about being friends with the Quad God.
His dad is his coach. Maybe he only cares because if Ilia wins, he can say that his son is a champion, that he coached his son to become the best figure skater ever.
Was there anyone around him who loved him for who he was? Was there anything to love beyond the recognition he could gain? It was hard for him to say.
When he inevitably fell, who would be there to stay? Who could love a failure, when all they were good for was winning?
Ilia Malinin throws one rough practice. He didn’t sleep the night before. He’s running on fumes and protein bars and dedication to keeping up perfection even when there is no audience but his own blood.
He pops two quad axels, manages to throw the third one and falls. He’s in his head, and he can’t crawl out of it, and the feeling only gets more suffocating as his dad stares on, telling him to forget about the axels for today and do something else. He’s disappointed.
He stumbles out of a quad toe and wobbles a landing on a quad salchow. He throws a quad lutz, and midway through it’s like his body forgets he’s even supposed to be jumping at all. A rough fall, he goes flying down the ice, and he can’t even find the capacity to get back up again.
His dad yells, and it’s garbled and muddied. He can assume what it is about. It’s about how bad he is, about how hopeless this display is altogether. It’s about how, if it were a real performance, he would score last, that when he falls, he always has to get back up and finish.
If only to avoid disappointing his father further, he manages to drag himself up and resume a mediocre practice that he already squandered.
They don’t speak on the way home from the rink.
Ilia Malinin begs for help. He’ll get on camera as the Quad God and turn it off to be nothing more than a shell. He barely talks to anybody, and he throws himself headfirst into training and right into his own mentality. If he’s not at the rink to train, he’s at the gym to train, and if it’s not that, then he’s studying to keep up his grades, or he’s lying in bed with his mind racing.
It’s like nobody notices. Nobody asks him anything about it. His social media presence in front of the camera must fool them into thinking nothing is happening.
His skates are great at least. Or, objectively, they are. Ilia, just like his dad, can certainly find something wrong with them. An underrotation that is not bad enough to be penalised, a sharp landing that’s not quite smooth enough into his next element.
There is always something for him to fix because he is not good enough.
He’s been trying for ages now, still unable to land a quint. He tells himself that once he can do it, then maybe it will be enough. He’s not sure who he’s trying to convince.
It’s in his own vested interest to stop looking at social media, but he can’t. He must be a masochist, because all he’ll do is lurk in his own tags, reading all the posts about himself.
They hate him.
They should.
They hate his attitude, his programmes, his music, his skating, his difficulty, his sportsmanship; they hate how he takes away opportunities from others. He’s selfish, he’s ungrateful, his personality is ugly and so is his skating.
They love him.
The commentators and the former skaters will swear that he is beyond belief, he is invincible, immortal, a never-before-seen talent, a revolutionary. He is the Quad God, the best male figure skater, the future of the sport, the favourite for every competition ever, expected to never place below 100 in points, to never make a mistake, to never fall, to never stumble, to never fail.
They love him when he’s perfect. They hate him when he’s perfect, they hate him when he’s not. It’s never enough. It will never appease them.
Ilia Malinin is suffocating.
It feels so ridiculous to complain. His dad is his coach, he has good grades, they have money, they have a rink he can train at nearby, and a gym that he can go to, and he’s a figure skater that he knows objectively is good. He doesn’t even deserve to be upset. He doesn’t deserve to be happy.
Ilia Malinin spends some of his nights crying his eyes bloodshot. By the time he gets up in the morning, unwell and unrested, they look normal enough that they are not discovered.
By the time they are nearing the Olympic season, Ilia Malinin is screaming from an enclosure. It is as if it is soundproof.
He hopes deep down that someone finally asks him what is wrong. He hopes they can tell—he knows they can tell. They don’t mention it, which means they must not care. He puts reposts on his TikTok that he thinks he’ll regret later, but he can’t find it in him to care. He begs everyone to see what he’s been saying behind the scenes for seasons.
It’s too much, and he feels like he is drowning.
I wish something bad would just happen to me so that I don’t have to do it to myself.
When it goes unmentioned by everyone, by the media that watches his every move, by his friends who follow him, by his dad and his mother, that’s when it feels real.
Nobody could care less. Shut up and figure skate, they seem to yell at him.
It’s all he’s been doing.
It’s not enough to keep him occupied, and the only thing that he can see on social media is hate.
Maybe, if I went out like Nancy Kerrigan right now, I could go down sympathetically in history. I could give them a chance to love me before I ruin it.
It’s a terrible thought, cruel and wishful and pointless and silly. It would give him a chance to be remembered as the Quad God, Olympic goals and aspirations dashed by forces beyond his control. It would finally make some of the haters quiet.
It doesn’t matter. He makes it. He knew that he would, and the thought filled him with dread.
Simply skating around the rink in practice feels terrifying. He lies to the media, pretends that he believed ever that he could walk onto the Olympic ice and treat it like a normal competition. Pretends like he hasn’t been scared ever since he found out he’d be going to Milan.
The team short skate comes, and he fumbles. He finishes the performance in complete fear, gets off the ice and stares at the scoreboard the entire time that Kagiyama goes on to compete. He knows it’s not enough; he knew it on the ice; he knew it the second that he stumbled.
Kagiyama beats him. The team needs him, and he failed them. His best wasn’t good enough, and all he does is fuck it up more when he lies in the midst of his panic and his self-depressive careening spiral and says that he only dedicated 50% to the skate.
They believe him. They hate him. It’s his fault that the point difference got smaller.
Team USA needs him. Especially because he failed them in the short skate.
They sent him for free. It’s a mistake. He knows it. He’s going to ruin it for them. He’s going to do horrifically bad; he’s going to ruin their chances. The entire team is relying on him for a good score, and he has to beat Kagiyama, but he already failed to do so once.
Ilia Malinin is inside his room at the Olympic Village rocking on the floor.
That is the night he is selected to do it for free. He knew it would happen no matter what. His breaths are staggered and uneven in his chest, tears running down his face, hands tangled in his hair.
Why would they make him do this? They know he’s not enough. Everyone knows he’s not enough. What will they say when he lives up to their expectations and he loses Team USA the Gold?
His performance is a blur. He makes mistakes. He falls, even if they don’t count it as one. He still wins. Team USA takes the gold, and he is hugged by his teammates. He stands on the podium with a gold medal around his neck that he helped to win.
But then it is his turn.
The short skate fills him with nerves. He goes, he does well, better than he did in the team event. He knows that this only adds credence to his early claim that he’d only given 50%, even though it’s not true.
They’ll realise soon enough that this win was a fluke, that maybe, the Quad God can only live down and not up to expectations.
Kagiyama steps out of a triple axel, and in that moment, Ilia Malinin has lived up to their expectations. In line for Gold.
It doesn’t feel good, and it feels even worse when he sees how many people are mad that he beat Yuma.
Yuma deserved it, anyway. It wasn’t his first Olympics, and his programme was spectacular.
Ilia is too nervous to even have an appetite before the men's free. He is easy only because he knows it is necessary for fuel. He practices on the Olympic ice and does well. He lies to himself that he can do well when he knows that he can’t.
He has to. He can’t, but he must try. Because Ilia Malinin is in line to win gold, and his country is rooting for him, his fans, and his family. They are rooting for the Quad God. Ilia Malinin is nothing without the title and the accolades that he needs.
It is not like Ilia has never choked under the pressure before. He still remembers the 2022 Worlds. After a shockingly strong performance in the nationals, they decided not to take him to the Beijing Olympics.
He was angry at the time. He felt like he’d been passed up, that if they had just given a chance, he could’ve maybe done something impressive there, and he was only 17, it was his first senior season—
He finished ninth.
It was the pressure. It was obvious. He’d done so well in the nationals, and people were expecting so much, and he was so young, and he was confident that he could maybe do well enough for a top 5 finish, only to collapse under the weight of the expectations.
That was what happened when his mental health was better.
He is already in fear when he enters the ice. He skates around and stops before his opening, only to be inundated with the feeling of his life flashing before his eyes. His biggest highs were the first time he landed the quad axel, the backflip, and the 7 quads in one competition. Every injury he’d ever had, every harsh fall, every time he’d failed his father. The 2022 World Championships. The 2026 Olympic Team Men’s Short Skate.
And then his own voice began to play.
And Ilia Malinin can’t keep it together.
It starts with his open jump, the opportunity to do a Quad Axel. He’d done them all day. His dad told him it was a good idea, since he could. He didn’t need to, but who knew if in 4 years he was going to be able to be the first? What if someone else in a free or a short who was higher up in the running order was able to do one and land it before him?
He went for it. He thought. He popped. A single.
Failed element.
God, what was he going to do? He scrambled for it again; his breath was already beginning to amp up, and he tried to calm back down. He couldn’t.
He couldn’t do anything. The programme was going by too quickly, and he was sick, scared, exhausted, overwhelmed; the pressure was mounting on him, and it didn’t even feel like he could see the rink at all. He lost the programme, and he knew what he was supposed to be doing, but he couldn’t find control over his body at all.
There is something like living in a dystopian nightmare, where you hear your own voice monologuing at you as you squander the biggest opportunity of your career. Listening to yourself proclaim that you are not nothing, as if you had ever once believed it, as you prove to yourself that it cannot be true.
The gold medal dreams are dashed before the programme is even halfway over. The only thing that he manages to do is land the backflip, and it has no technical score. There’s no point at all. It’s showing off for no reason in a programme he doesn’t deserve to show off. It’s a desperate cling to normalcy, a hope that maybe he can get back on track and stop ruining himself in front of everyone to see.
He still manages to fall.
All he can do is shake his head, all he can do is keep skating and skating as the sound of the audience roars in his ears; their gasps, their silence. He feels the horror consuming him and the nausea rolling. He can’t stop until it’s over.
Until it’s over, and he throws his hands up, and he bursts into tears.
He could’ve done it. He could’ve done it with two popped jumps. He couldn’t have done it with all of that.
On the biggest night of his career, with all the pressure and the expectations and the whole world watching him like they never had before, Ilia Malinin imploded.
He skates around the ice, crying into his hands, trying to take a breath. The cameras are still on him. They won’t leave for a while. They documented everything. This will be what he is remembered for. The most underwhelming Olympic performance of all time.
He doesn’t have any hope left as he skates off the ice, and there's nothing that anyone could say to him that would make what he just did better, or the inevitable blow less.
Someone says something garbled about fifth position, and he nods mindlessly as he walks to the kiss and cries, hardly in the mood for kissing.
He’s bitter and angry and humiliated and terrified and still trying to stave off the panic attack that probably already began the moment he got on the ice. Turns to his dad and mutters under his breath, “If they sent me to Beijing, this wouldn’t have happened.”
He knows it’s a lie. He told the media that it was a good thing he hadn’t gone to Beijing earlier in the week. Everyone knows that it’s a lie because this probably would’ve been the outcome there too, and it was obvious by his shitty ninth place in the Worlds only a month later.
He’s not thinking about the media when he says it, or how it’s audible even under his breath, or how people will run with it.
It’s petulant and petty, a lie from the bottom of his heart he can’t even believe. It sounds arrogant, and it’s a stupid excuse, everything they accuse him of being rolled into one. He doesn’t know who he’s saying it for. Who would he be able to convince? Not himself, or his dad, or the people who hate him.
He turns to his dad and hopes for something, anything at all, any form of reassurance. Looks back at the scoreboard and watches his place plummet from first to eighth.
Then he sees his dad bury his head and his hands.
Disappointed.
Ilia has failed them. Them all. Everybody.
He doesn’t know what to say.
The overwhelming emotions is grief, maybe regret, horror. He missed 72 points alone in jumping passes.
That is the only thing that he’s good at.
He lacks artistry, what he lapses for he makes up for with his jumps. Without his jumps, he is nothing, and he had no jumps worth mentioning.
If you had told him that this was possible, even mere minutes before the competition, when he was filled witht he most amount of self-doubt he’d ever experienced, he probably would’ve told you it wasn’t. That even if he didn’t win, because he never thought he could, he wouldn’t have done this.
Mikhail Shaidorov wins the Olympic gold medal for men’s figure skating, and Ilia manages, half on autopilot and half genuine, to get up and immediately congratulate him.
To tell him he earned it. And he did. Shaidorov was perfect. He was great. It is a huge victory for him and for Kazakhstan. The money he earns for his medal will change his life.
He walks off, and he can’t get the cameras off, and all it is is a constant barrage of people talking about how disappointing his placement was.
What happened? They ask him.
“I don’t know.”
It was the pressure. It was hate. It was the praise. It was the Olympics.
It was his self-hatred.
Ilia Malinin had tried everything. He tried to be confident. He gave himself the nickname the Quad God. He tried to appease everyone. He tried to pretend that he had it together. He tried to push himself. He tried to call out for help.
He tried, and he tried, and he tried.
And in the end, all he managed to do was live up to his own worst thoughts and his own worst fears.
Maybe that split-second comment was right, and it would’ve been different with Beijing.
Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe he told himself that he wouldn’t be able to do it enough times, so he made it come true.
Maybe the truth was that he was not the Quad God. Maybe the truth was that he was not Olympic material.
Maybe he really is just a failure.
There are several things for certain.
His father will not speak to him.
He is not something. He is nothing.
He is leaving with no individual medals.
He choked under pressure.
He has disappointed everyone who was rooting for him. His country. His fans. His team. His family. His friends.
Worst of all, Ilia Malinin will still have to beg for help, all for no one to hear.
If no one took him seriously while he was undefeated, why would they now? If no one cared while he was at the top, who would care while he was at the bottom? If they saw it as a joke before, what else would they see it as a ploy for sympathy now?
And, beyond all of that, Ilia Malinin had felt that this was inevitable the entire time, so perhaps his feelings had only been justified.