Ilia Malinin smiled broadly as he slapped hands with his father/coach, Roman Skorniakov, on the boards at the Milano Olympic Ice Center.

That was just before he skated to the center of the ice to begin his free skate Friday in the men’s singles event at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

No wonder he smiled. Malinin had a five-point lead over Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama after the short program. And his path toward an Olympic gold medal was seemingly clear of any obstacles after Kagiyama, skating before Malinin, made mistakes big and small on three of his first five jumping passes.

Malinin figured to be smiling even more broadly soon.

But when Malinin finished his four-minute free, he first masked his reaction by covering his face with his gloved hands.

He shook his head, lowered his eyes, shook his head again as he skated off the ice toward his father. Still out of breath, his mouth was open in a narrow rectangle. He shook his head one last time, each shake signaling that Malinin’s incomprehension was complete, just as it was for everybody who had watched him come undone.

Did we really see him skate so badly he finished fifteenth (15th!?!) in the free skate and dropped from first to eighth overall, 27 points behind surprise champion and fellow 21-year-old Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan?

Did we really see him wind up with by far the worst free skate score, 156.33, of his four years at the sport’s senior level, a score nearly 70 points below the world record he had set in his last international event two months ago?

Did we really see him fall twice, turn two planned quadruple jumps into doubles and a third, his trademark quad Axel, into a single?

We did, and it just didn’t make sense. How do you comprehend what was likely the most thorough unraveling of an unquestionably great skater in Olympic history?

After all, this was the man who had won the last two world titles, the guy who had recently landed a record seven clean quads in a single free skate, the guy so heavily favored for gold that before these Olympics began, one betting site had listed his odds at -10,000, which translates as a 99 percent chance of winning.

Maybe there was, in fact, too much hubris in declaring himself the “Quad God” four years ago, when he had yet to win any major event. Maybe the Olympian gods stored that defiance away, waiting—as in a classic Greek tragedy—to strike him down until he was on their turf. Or ice.

A lot of maybes. Few answers.

“It's still a lot to handle, a lot to process, so I honestly don't know what actually happened in the moment,” Malinin said. "So all I know is that it wasn't my best skate, and it was definitely something I wasn't expecting, and it's done, so I can't go back and change it, even though I would love to.”

And maybe, as he had said to explain his unremarkable skating in both the short and free programs while winning gold in the team event a week ago, it was a lot harder going into his first Olympics with enormous expectations than he had imagined.

“All the pressure of the Olympics is really something different,” Malinin said after the free skate. “I think all of this pressure, all of the media, and just, you know, being the Olympic gold hopeful was just too much.  It was really just something that overwhelmed me, and I just felt like I had no control.”

He referenced how hard it is to anticipate such an atmosphere without having experienced it that by bringing up an old wound: his having been denied a spot on the 2022 Olympics in Beijing by U.S. Figure Skating, despite his having finished second at the U.S. Championships a month earlier.

(Given Malinin’s mediocre international results to that point, leaving him off was justifiable if short-sighted.)

As he waited for his scores, NBC’s microphones heard Malinin saying. “They should have sent me to Beijing. Then I wouldn’t have skated like this.” That such a thought came up so fast showed just how thoroughly embedded in his mind the potential long-term implications of missing a chance to experience the Olympics without pressure had become.

“(In Beijing), Ilia would have had no expectations,” his mother and one of his coaches, Tatiana Malinina, had told me a month after the 2022 Olympics. “Next time, he will hopefully go to the Olympics, and everyone will expect him to get a medal, I assume. That is a lot of pressure. When you have no experience, you can break up and not do as well as you want.”

He did break up.  Other recent singles medalists have won them in their Olympic debuts despite expectations, but few have been hyped the way Malinin was.

“Of course, I think if I went to ‘22 then I would have had more experience and know how to handle this Olympic environment," Malinin told reporters while the medal ceremony was going on. “But I don't know what the next stages of my life would look like if I went there, so now all I can do is just regroup from this.”

Before disappearing into the arena’s backstage area, he walked over to embrace Shaidorov, who also was in a state of disbelief.

The Kazakh had also been a surprise world silver medalist last year, but his performances prior to the Olympics this season had been so inconsistent no one could envision him on the podium, let alone its top step. He was 10 points from third and 16 from Malinin after the short program.

“I was watching Ilia, and I was really supporting him," Shaidorov said through an interpreter. “He started to make mistakes, and I was really surprised, because he really rarely makes mistakes.

“Then when the marks came, I actually didn't really see them, because I don't have good eyesight. And when I finally saw the marks, I was just overwhelmed.”

In the best way. By joy.

Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at 13 straight Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCOlympics.com.