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Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles immediately empathized with Ilia Malinin after he finished off the podium in the men’s singles figure skating final at the Milan Cortina Olympics, the star gymnast told Olympics.com on Tuesday.

Biles, watching from the stands in Milan, said she was concerned about how the weight of expectations might affect Malinin’s mental health, knowing firsthand how difficult it is to perform when the world expects gold.

After Malinin’s eighth-place finish, Biles said she reached out immediately, sending him supportive messages and her phone number. When they later met in Milan, her goal was to validate his feelings and remind him that setbacks under intense scrutiny are human — and survivable.

“I was really worried about how his mental health was going to be,” Biles said in the interview. “When you’re expected to skate a performance of your lifetime, and you don’t deliver, I worry how that affects his mental and how the world is going to view that.

“I’ve been through that firsthand, and so I really went into protection mode.”