Having won fourteen straight events going into the 2026 Winter Olympics, Ilia Malinin was the bona fide favorite to take the gold medal home. But fate had other plans, as Malinin struggled to cope with the pressure, fell twice, and finished eighth in the final segment. The result stunned the world, but the American has since addressed that disappointment as he stands on the precipice of another gold medal.

As he heads into the free-skate segment at the 2026 ISU World Figure Skating Championships, the 21-year-old has a nine-point lead over his competitors. However, it took all the willpower and mental endurance to move past his Olympic performance, something Malinin has only now come to terms with.

“Coming back from there was just really hard,” Malinin said, as per NBC. “A few days, I kept thinking about it, 24/7, and (of) so many different things that I could have done differently to give a different outcome.

“But in the end, this outcome is what happened, and I had to move on. In a different universe I would have won the Olympics and maybe decided not to do the World Championships. But here I am.”

The 21-year-old figure skater produced the performance in the short program at the 2026 World Figure Skating Championships that everyone expected from him at the Olympics. It was a marvelous routine, as Ilia Malinin nailed a quadruple flip, a triple axel, and even a quadruple Lutz-triple toe loop combination as he finished with a 111.29 score.

That is the sixth-highest ever score in the discipline (Nathan Chen holds the highest at 113.97), but it is the highest by an active skater. It’s also his personal best. As for Malinin’s competition, Adam Siao Him Fa and Aleksandr Selevko scored 101.85 and 96.49, showing the American’s dominance.

Clearly, things have now changed for Ilia Malinin as a different version of the figure skater has arrived.

Ilia Malinin believes another version of him has appeared

However, this comes after his performance in Milan, where Malinin helped Team USA win team gold and then led by 5 points after the short program in the individual event. But a series of mistakes and two falls saw him drop from first to eighth as Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov won the gold, in one of the biggest shocks of the tournament.

It meant that missing out on the podium entirely left Ilia Malinin heartbroken, but it helped change his perspective on figure skating and performance.

“This is another version of me, another part of me that just appeared out of nowhere, the person not trying to put so much expectations on me,” Malinin explained. “This is me just wanting to enjoy doing what I love.”

And it has shown in his performance, as his quad flip in particular scored very strongly with the judges, and Ilia Malinin himself couldn’t believe his score, looking shocked after the judges’ decision. But with the free-skate segment left at the 2026 ISU World Figure Skating Championships, only time will tell if Ilia Malinin manages to win his third straight world title.