There are no sure things at the highest level of sports. Even overwhelming favorites sometimes lose. So it takes a lot for an individual or a team to be a virtual lock.
At the Olympics on Tuesday, Ilia Malinin will be a virtual lock when he takes the ice in figure skating.
Before the team competition, he had -10000 odds on FanDuel to win individual gold, the equivalent of a 99 percent chance of victory. Those are the odds typically reserved for No. 1 seeds against No. 16 seeds in the NCAA basketball tournament. How is such a high win probability possible in figure skating, a sport where one fall is usually devastating?
For comparison, the favorite in the women’s field, Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto, is +160 on Caesars Sportsbook and +175 on DraftKings, which implies Sakamoto has a less than 40 percent chance of winning. That’s what a more typical competition looks like: a top skater for the field to knock off, but it wouldn’t be a monumental upset if the favorite were to lose.
Sakamoto won the world championship three years in a row from 2022 to 2024, but took silver last year in Boston.
Meanwhile, Malinin, the two-time defending world champion with a catchy “Quad God” nickname, is viewed as nearly untouchable. How has Malinin turned the rest of the best skaters in the world into Fairleigh Dickinson?
The short answer is degree of difficulty.
In figure skating, every move has a base score, and skaters gain or lose points based on how well they perform that move, which is called the grade of execution (GOE). By attempting higher-difficulty jumps throughout his routines, Malinin can win, even if he stumbles on a jump, as he did during the team competition.
“Ilia packs his programs with quadruple jumps, so it raises his ceiling,” said Marcus Thompson, who is covering figure skating in Milan for The Athletic. “If you do two quads and six triples, and I do seven quads and one triple, I have the higher possibility. If I execute well, I’m smoking you because my jumps get more points.
“On top of that, you get bonus points for doing jumps later in the program, when fatigue plays a factor. So when other skaters are basically done with jumps, Ilia is still doing quadruples, getting bonus points in the process. So in order for him to lose, he has to be really terrible at executing his jumps, and the others have to be flawless to get the highest GOE possible.”
The team competition was a good example of this. Malinin made mistakes in both programs but still won the free skate, clinching the gold medal for the U.S.
Malinin was second in the short program behind Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama. He had a negative grade of execution on two of the three jump elements, one of which was a combination, while Kagiyama was positive across the board during a clean skate.
In the free skate, Malinin had one major mistake, stumbling on a quad Lutz that was meant to be part of a combination. He added a combo later in his routine to make up some of those points. Meanwhile, Japan’s Shun Sato was clean in what was a season-best score of 194.86. Despite the stumble, Malinin crossed 200 points, a number neither Kagiyama nor Sato has reached this season.
In other words, a performance from Malinin that involved a significant error was still better than anything his top competitors have done all season. Malinin’s top performance, on the other hand, was a 238.24 in the free skate at the ISU Grand Prix Final in December. That’s the highest score ever recorded by the International Skating Union in a free skate under the current scoring system, which was implemented in 2004. In the final standings, Malinin was nearly 30 points better than Kagiyama, who finished in second place, and more than 40 points ahead of Sato in third.
The reason Malinin is so heavily favored is mostly a math problem. His floor is near the rest of the field’s ceiling, and his ceiling is higher than anyone in the history of the sport.
For what it’s worth, the close team competition did shift Malinin’s odds of winning, though not drastically. FanDuel now has him at -4000, which still gives him a roughly 97 percent chance of winning gold. Caesars has him at -2000, roughly 95 percent. There’s a window for the rest of the field, but it’s small.
Just like in March Madness, Cinderella will need something special and some help to pull off this upset.
