I wasn’t planning to make my boys watch Olympic figure skating with me, but that changed with Ilia Malinin’s disastrous free skate. What I thought would be an exciting gold medal performance turned out to be something much better. Malinin’s grace, honesty and humility as his personal nightmare unfolded offer a lesson in real human excellence that I can’t afford for my sports-obsessed sons to miss.
I have four boys, and like others their age, they’re struggling to decide between a career in the NFL or YouTube stardom. They love playing sports for many reasons, such as running around, hitting people and hitting people with friends. But let’s be honest: The potential for glory is a major draw. Why settle for being loved when you can be worshipped like Tom Brady or LeBron James?
Whether we like it or not, sports stars occupy the Mount Olympus of adolescent imagination. When my oldest finally got his own room, he immediately put up a poster of Donovan Mitchell soaring toward the hoop with one basketball-clutching arm extended. My kids have never been into Marvel heroes, but I’m not convinced they wouldn’t break laws for Bear Bachmeier. When Cougar basketball star Richie Saunders held a local devotional for youth, my son and I crammed into a basement overflow as Saunders addressed a crowd of teens filling the aisles and walkways.
As a parent, it can be disconcerting to watch your child rivet their attention upon athletes — even the well-behaved ones. The action stills and brand deals convey a vision of excellence centered on fame, wealth and winning. None of these are necessarily bad things, but if they aren’t accompanied by deep personal growth, rehab and a brutal midlife crisis likely await.
Professional athletes divorce at higher rates, and the majority of NFL and NBA players go broke within a few years of retirement. In 2009, Sports Illustrated found that 78% of former NFL players had “gone bankrupt” or were “under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce,” and half were struggling with depression. Former league counsel David Cornwell says most players just don’t know how to cope when they are no longer on top: “The problem isn’t that people think the player walks on water. It’s that when the player played, he thought he could walk on water.”
Ilia Malinin’s Olympic debut reveals just how fickle that fortune can be. Malinin was the overwhelming favorite for gold in the men’s individual figure skating event. The 21-year-old has won the last two World Championships and holds the world record score of 238.24 points in the free skate. A month ago, figure skating gold medalist Scott Hamilton praised his technical and artistic brilliance, adding that everyone else would be “competing for second place” at the Olympics.
However, Malinin didn’t get first place. He didn’t even get second. In an unthinkable upset, the only man to land a quadruple axel in competition got eighth place at the Olympics. The world’s best figure skater fell twice in his last skate and flubbed the technical elements for which he’s best known. His name had been all but etched on the gold medal when suddenly the news cycle flooded with images of his pained face above headlines lamenting the tragic fall of the “Quad God.”
Like many parents, I’d love for my kids to experience the highs of sports excellence, but Malinin’s implosive performance on a world stage reminds us of the risks. A fall from Mount Olympus is a long one, especially if one’s self-worth is tied to the whims of fortune or the external validation that public success places within their reach.
Knowing this is what makes Malinin’s after-skate actions so important. In a titanic gesture of goodwill, Malinin stepped off the ice and embraced Mikhail Shaidorov, the now-gold medalist from Kazakhstan. We can’t hear what he’s saying, but Malinin’s face is tender and composed as he congratulates Shaidorov, whose arms he’s still gripping.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a politician or government official today who could exhibit as much responsibility and self-awareness as Ilia Malinin did on the worst day of his life.
Speaking with reporters on his way out, Malinin frankly owned his part. “I blew it,” he said simply. He quietly admitted that “there’s just like so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there and I just did not handle them.” The emotionally ravaged skater’s vulnerable admission that “maybe (he) was overconfident” is remarkable given how the world had anticipated his gold medal in advance of that high-pressure skate.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a politician or government official today who could exhibit as much responsibility and self-awareness as Ilia Malinin did on the worst day of his life. He didn’t undersell the tragedy of what he’d lost, and he didn’t retreat to self-pity or blame. Exhausted and reeling, the skating prodigy congratulated the challenger he should have beaten and then placed his weaknesses before the world’s scrutiny. Had this been the smooth sail to victory everyone anticipated, I could have let my boys miss it. They’ve seen plenty of literal and metaphorical slam dunks. What they rarely witness is graceful failure. Far from a trite ideal, this an essential element of real greatness.
Being gracious and humble when life razes our dreams to the ground allows us to exist as individuals apart from those dreams and the expectations that come with them. Malinin’s candor, humility and poise showcase a young man whose identity exists apart from his performance in sports — a young man whose ego isn’t shattered simply because the appearance of his athletic perfection is. It’s a loud but unspoken message that there is more to a person than athletic achievement, which is an example I need my boys to see.
Ilia Malinin will one day be one of the gold-medal gods taking his place on Mount Olympus. When that happens, it will be more meaningful because the world witnessed the best of his humanity.