MILAN — The Milano Ice Skating Arena has less ambiance than a truck stop on the way from Tucson to Tucumcari.
The Olympic figure skating venue is so ugly that local officials seemingly stuck it 30 minutes from Milano’s city center, past the end of the Metro line, next to a freeway, in hopes no one would notice it on their way to Genoa.
The arena known prior to the Games as the Milan Forum is 36 years old and although it seems decades older, the late 1980s time frame makes sense given that it appears to be designed and constructed by Soviet architects who were Star Wars fans but only had leftovers from the Chernobyl disaster to work with; a Death Star waiting to be put out its misThe building is just as much a dump inside, dark and dingy with cracks all over the joint.
Whether Saturday night’s team figure skating men’s short program exposed cracks in Ilia Malinin’s invincibility or whether the sport’s self-proclaimed Quad God was simply saving his superpowers for later in the Games remains to be seen.
Malinin, the two-time World champion and overwhelming favorite to retain for the U.S. the Olympic men’s gold medal Nathan Chen won four years ago in Beijing, finished second to Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama.
Malinin’s second place and Madison Chock and Evan Bates’ victory in ice dancing later Saturday night gave Team USA a 44-39 lead against Japan going into Sunday’s final three sections of the team competition: the pairs, women’s and men’s free skates.
Although Malinin said after the short program that he was uncertain whether he will compete in the team free skate, U.S. Figure Skating announced just before midnight that he would in fact compete Sunday.
“I’ll go back and talk about it with a lot of people and really just make a decision, what’s going to be worth it for me,” Malinin said after the short program.
Skating Sunday means Malinin will skate four competitive programs in seven days at these Games. Which is why he said he was playing the long game Saturday night.
Malinin, who hasn’t lost a major international competition in more than two years, landed only two quad jumps, one less than he had in winning a fourth U.S. title last month while “playing it safe” and five fewer than the record seven quads he hit at the ISU Grand Prix final in December. He did not attempt a Quad Axel, the sport’s hardest jump of which only Malinin has landed in competition.
“I wasn’t expecting to go out here and win the competition,” Malinin said. “That was not my goal here for the team event. My team event was to focus on myself and how I feel, just overall. And you know, I’m pretty happy with what I did, because that’s only 50 percent of my full potential here. So overall, that’s just really proud of everything like that.”
But Malinin, who struggled with boot and foot issues at the U.S. Championships, was unusually shaky on more than one landing Saturday. Even so, Malinin appeared disappointed when his score flashed on the scoreboard, putting him more than 10 points behind Kagiyama — 108.67 to 98.00.
“Not really,” Malinin said when asked if he was surprised by his score. “I’m not thinking about the score. I’m just thinking about the moment, and I just want to enjoy every single Olympic moment I have here.”
Saturday was Malinin’s Olympic debut. Four years ago, he was a surprising second at the U.S. Championships, essentially the Olympic Trials, but was not selected to compete in the Beijing Games. Seven months later, he landed skating’s first quad axel in competition, and a year later, he won the first of four consecutive U.S. titles.
“It was such an unreal moment coming to the Olympics,” Malinin said. “You know, everyone has been talking about the Olympics for years, ever since I’ve started skating from a young age. And it was something that I’ve dreamed upon going and really just being out there on that Olympic ice was just, you know, the best moment of itself.”
And even at 50 percent, Malinin still delivered the best moment of the night, a back flip halfway through his routine, giving a couple thousand less than capacity crowd a buzz as they tried not to slip through the arena’s cracks as they headed back to town.
“I need to do such incredible like that,” he said. “The roar, the feeling in the environment just once I do that back flip, everyone’s like, you know, screaming for joy, and they’re just out of control. And I think it’s really something that’s really bringing back the popularity of the sport. … So I think just having that really just can bring in the non figure skating crowd as well. “
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