At the gala for Milano Cortina 2026, Ilia Malinin didn’t just skate—he unloaded everything he’d been carrying. Moving to “Fear” by NF, he stepped onto the ice with his hoodie up and a phone in his hand, acting out the noise that never seems to stop—the comments, the headlines, the pressure to be perfect. He flinched from invisible camera flashes, hunched over like the weight of the world was sitting on his back.

MILAN, ITALY — For two years, he was the “Quad God”—a technical machine who seemed impervious to the laws of physics and the weight of expectation. But last night at the Milano Ice Skating Arena, Ilia Malinin finally let the mask slip.

In what is being called the most “spiritually heavy” exhibition in Olympic history, Malinin took to the ice not to celebrate, but to exorcise. Following an individual event that saw him “shattered” by the pressure, finishing a shock 8th after entering the free skate with the lead, Malinin delivered a routine to NF’s “Fear” that felt like a public autopsy of his own mental state.

THE ‘SAVAGE’ REALITY OF DIGITAL NOISE

Dressed in a grey hoodie with the word “Fear” printed upside down and frayed jeans, Malinin didn’t start with a jump. He started with a flinch.

As the “digital noise” of the arena speakers mimicked social media alerts and the “clatter” of paparazzi cameras, Malinin mimed scrolling through his phone, his face illuminated by the cold blue light of a screen. It was a “visceral” representation of the scrutiny that analysts say led to his “inevitable crash” on the ice just one week prior.

“The noise, the media, the environment—it was overwhelming,” Malinin told reporters, his voice more measured than it had been all month. “I wanted to show that we are human beings. We aren’t robots.”

SIDEBAR: THE ANATOMY OF A CATHARSIS

‘RIPPING OFF THE BANDAGES’

The performance reached its crescendo when Malinin, eyes hidden beneath his hood, suddenly “detonated” into a massive quadruple jump followed by his signature backflip, landing on one foot with a precision that had eluded him during the medal rounds.

It was the sight of a man “ripping off emotional bandages” in real-time. By the time he mimed putting on headphones for the final bars of the song—plunging the entire arena into a “charged, heavy silence”—there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

While Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan may have taken the individual gold with his “Kung Fu Panda” charm, Malinin took home something perhaps more valuable: his humanity. As he put it himself, the boy who arrived in Milan is “dust,” but the man who left the ice last night looks ready to build something new.

Was Ilia’s ‘Fear’ routine the most honest moment in Olympic history, or was it a ‘harrowing’ reminder that we expect too much from our young stars?