The U.S. prevailed over Japan by one point to retain the title it won at the Beijing Games in 2022.
The United States won gold in the team figure skating event at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics on Sunday, retaining the title it won four years ago in Beijing.
This time, the result was more straightforward, and the skaters received their medals at the Milano Ice Skating Arena. That’s the way it usually works, but at the Beijing Games in 2022, a doping scandal involving one of the Russian skaters left the final results up in the air for nearly two years, and no medals were awarded in the event before the athletes left those Olympics.
It’s especially rewarding for Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who competed in the team event in 2022 and also skated in both the rhythm and free dance in Milan, earning Team USA the maximum 20 points for their portions. In total, team competition awards 80 points—10 points each for each of the four disciplines’ (women, men, pairs and dance) short and free programs.
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There were high expectations for the U.S. to finish on top, since Team USA includes the current world champions in three of the four disciplines—women, men, and ice dance. So the small margin of victory—one point—came as a surprise.
On day one, reigning world champion Alysa Liu made her return to the Olympics after a two-year retirement, but skated for the first time in the team event. Her short program earned the U.S. nine points, after the judges made minor deductions for the scratchy landing on her double axel, ranking her second behind Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto. “My landing was really forward, right?” she said afterward.
Chock and Bates, the world champions in ice dance, roused the crowd with their rhythm dance to Lenny Kravitz and easily earned the U.S. the maximum 10 points for their segment. Pairs Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea finished fifth, earning six points for the U.S.
On the second day, a packed stadium eagerly anticipated the now hallmark show from the quad god Ilia Malinin in the men’s short program portion, complete with back flip, but got perhaps the biggest surprise of the event, when he faltered a bit and finished second behind Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, collecting 9 of the possible 10 points. He elected not to perform the quadruple axel he had listed as part of his program, and received deductions for not fully completing all four rotations of his quadruple lutz jump in his jump combination. He said it took several hours afterward for him to process what happened, and attributed some of it to the pressure of being at the Olympics. “I didn’t really understand the impact of the Olympic environment,” he said. “I think it was the shock of really being at the Olympics for the first time.”
There was another factor playing into his debut on Olympic ice. Also selected to skate in the men’s free program segment of the team event the following day, Malinin said the imperfect short program was in some ways calculated, and that he had made a decision weeks ago that he would bypass the quad axel if he were selected for the team event. “I presumed to come into this team competition with only 50% of my full potential,” he said following the short program, with the goal of pacing himself and conserving his energy in order to compete four times over the course of six days in both the team and his individual event.
On the final day of the team event, the U.S. decided to substitute national champion Amber Glenn for Liu in the free program. Each country can exchange up to two skaters after the short program segments, and this was the only substitution the U.S. opted to use. The decision reflects the delicate balancing act the U.S. Figure Skating Association and the skaters’ coaches try to achieve between giving the team its best chance of winning bragging rights as a country, and ensuring that individual skaters aren’t exhausted from skating an extra program or two over the short period of the Games.
Kicking off the last portion of the competition, U.S. pairs Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea skated to a season’s best score, which was enough to keep the U.S. in the lead before the women took to the ice for the free program. They finished fourth out of the five teams in the final, and earned seven rather than six points, which may have contributed to the difference between gold and silver for Team USA.
In the women’s free program, Glenn hung on to her triple axel, but received lower execution scores on that jump and the following two, reflecting her nerves at the start of the program. “There were many, many, many points left on the table,” she said. “I just physically didn’t feel great. My legs were feeling heavy, and I think I just had some fatigue. I wish that I could have kept that lead for us, but unfortunately I lost it.” Glenn said it was a bit disorienting to skate the free program, since in competitions, skaters normally start with the short program, which allows them to get a feel for the ice and the arena, before moving on to the free.
Glenn’s skate earned her a lower score than the U.S. was hoping, and she finished third behind Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto and Anastasiia Gubanova from Georgia, which tied the U.S. and Japan after that segment. “I do feel guilty that I could be the reason that we don’t win the gold, and I don’t know how I will ever apologize for that,” she said after her skate.
It was up to the men, and for the U.S., Malinin, to break the tie. “I can’t imagine being in his shoes, and that’s another thing I feel guilty about,” Glenn said, “I’m so sorry that I had to put this pressure on to him.” Watching Malinin skate, Glenn couldn’t hide her anxiety and received comforting hugs from Bates in the Team USA box.
Malinin, however, didn’t see it that way. “I felt really proud of that attention, that pressure, because to see that it was going to be a tie, and that the deciding factor was going to be my skate, I really went out there and just decided, ‘Okay, let the nerves down. You really need to get in that zone and really just let things happen.” While he rose to the challenge, he did show some fallibility in his quad god status, stumbling out of the first jump in a planned combination, which forced him to switch up his jump series and led to deductions for repeating one of them (skaters can only perform solo jumps once in a program, and can repeat them only in combination with other jumps). But with five quad jumps, his skate was still enough to earn him 200.03 points, ahead of Japan’s Shun Sato, who skated a clean program but without the technical difficulty of Malinin’s routine and earned 194.86. Those scores put the U.S. one point ahead of Japan for gold.
Since debuting as an Olympic event in 2014, skaters and skating fans have been divided over the team event and its utility. Some see it as a somewhat contrived way to squeeze more skating into the Olympic program—and to a certain extent, it is—while others see it as an opportunity. It’s a chance to skate a program on Olympic ice, and skaters welcome any window to do that with an audience to mimic the pressure of the individual event. Malinin saw skating twice before the men’s event even begins as a positive—“to test the ice again, just to see how it feels, to really prepare myself for the individual event,” he said.
And the scores from the team event can be a bit of a harbinger of how skaters will rank in those later events, even though some judges will shift from the team competition to others.
Still, those psychological advantages have to be weighed against the physical toll of potentially skating in two full competitions over the space of six days. As with Malinin, Chock and Bates also skated in both the rhythm and free dance segments of the team event; they will immediately compete the following day, without a break, in the ice dance event, or the equivalent of skating two full competitions over six days. “We came into the event knowing that was a possibility,” Chock said. “So we’re mentally and physically prepared.”
While most skaters run through their short and free programs every day, skating them at your home rink during training sessions isn’t quite the same as competing under high pressure and high expectations, and the Olympic rings. At least the men get a day of rest before their individual competition starts. “It’s not just about the physical strength,” said Masaya Mortia, an ice dancer for Japan. “It’s for the mental preparation as well. If we had a rest day, it would be better, and make the program itself better.”
Category: General Sports
