“I watched him skate [from] the locker room, and I was just so proud of him,” Malinin said of Shaidorov, the first Kazakh skater to win an Olympic title. “I heard that he had not had a good season, and, you know, all of us were there to support each other.”
Malinin’s first words after finishing the free skate were caught by a hot mic, and included a pointed reaction to his being overlooked for the 2022 Beijing Olympics in a fraught but justifiable decision by U.S. Figure Skating. “They should have sent me to Beijing, then I wouldn’t have skated like this.”
In his text, Jenkins went on to describe the pressure felt by anyone going into the Winter Games as the favorite. That was the case for him, his brother, David Jenkins, and his wife, Carol Heiss, the latter two winning gold in 1960.
“Carol, David and I have talked about this,’ Hayes Jenkins said. “Each of us skated in the Olympics immediately preceding the Olympics that we were ‘expected’ to win, since each of us were going into that second Olympics as the current world champion.
NOTHING in our competitive experience prepared us for the immense pressure of the Olympics when you are expected to win, including defending our national or world titles.
Hayes Jenkins
