The brilliant American was expected to glide to a gold medal on Friday. It was tough to watch such a gifted athlete discover the ruthlessness of his sport<\/p>\n
By the time Ilia Malinin<\/a> reached the closing stretch of his Olympic free skate, the outcome was no longer really the story. The story was the expression on his face \u2013 not panic, not shock, but the dawning realization that a destiny he had controlled for nearly three years had slipped beyond his reach<\/a> in the blinding span of four and a half catastrophic minutes.<\/p>\n For the rising generation of men\u2019s skaters, the 21-year-old Malinin has existed less as a rival than as a moving technical horizon. The Quad God<\/a>. The skater who built programs around jumps others still treated as theory, who pushed the sport into something closer to applied physics. Much like Simone Biles, who took in Friday\u2019s contest from the arena\u2019s VIP seats, his only competition was himself.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The brilliant American was expected to glide to a gold medal on Friday. It was tough to watch such a gifted athlete discover the ruthlessness of his sport By the time Ilia Malinin reached the closing stretch of his Olympic free skate, the outcome was no longer really the story. The story was the expression … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}