The great ones make it look so easy that we forget how hard it is to be exceptional.
Secretariat running like a machine in the Belmont and Michael Phelps gobbling up gold medals in 2008; Tom Brady engineering seven Super Bowl victories and Simone Biles coming back for more golds after battling the twisties; Carl Lewis winning golds in 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 and Katie Ledecky lapping Olympians like she's out for a rec league swim.
There is, however, a fragility to true excellence. As thin, you might say, as a skate blade or a ski's edge.
WhatIlia Malininfailed to do in his free skate at these Olympics and whatMikaela Shiffrinhas struggled to do at her last Games and in her first event here do not erase anything that they have accomplished elsewhere. They are champions.
Alas, the reality of sports demands that true greatness is measured only on the biggest stage, where the physical strength and innate talent gifted to every superior athlete takes a backseat to mental fortitude. It becomes more about compartmentalizing while simultaneously absorbing the moment, blocking out the noise and still embracing the pressure.
It is true for every athlete in every sport, the delineation between having an asterisk – the greatest who never won – to just being the greatest.
But reaching that singular plateau is especially tricky for Olympic athletes. Like Malinin and Shiffrin, they can achieve record-setting numbers in the off years between the quad cycle only to have it all rendered irrelevant by one misstep in the Games.
In the course of her track career, Mary Decker Slaney set 17 official and unofficial world records and became the first woman to run a sub 4:20 in the mile. Even now, more than 40 years later, the lasting image of her career is of Decker laying on the track in anguish and tears after colliding with Zola Budd in the 1984 Olympic 3,000-meter run. She never got a gold.
Everyone remembers the "Miracle on Ice." No one talks much about the heavily-favored Russian team that had won five of the previous six gold Olympic gold medals only to lose to the upstart Americans.
Shiffrin, who has succeed and failed in three Games prior to this one, talked about the unique spotlight of the Olympics before racing here. She said she wished more people recognized what happens during the longevity of a career versus the quadrennial, three-week window of the Olympics. But she's also smart enough to understand that's not how it works.
Sometimes, Olympians are like basketball teams that win big in the regular season only to get bounced in the NCAA Tournament or the NBA Playoffs.
Kentucky won 38 games in 2014-15 and lost one, but the one came in the national semifinal to Wisconsin. The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors went a record 73-9 in the regular season and were 3-1 up in the NBA Finals – but they unbelievably lost to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in seven games.
No banner, no glory.
Pressure is a privilege?
"I really chose to believe that it's a beautiful gift, despite maybe feeling a little bit of pressure at times,'' Shiffrin said.
"Knowing that judgments can be made on the sole moment when there's so much else that has gone into the course of the last four years, in the last eight years and 16 years of my career so far, so pressure can exist. Billie Jean King said pressure is a privilege, but maybe that doesn't always feel that way.''
Malinin discovered the enormity of the Games only when it was too late. "It's not like any other competition,'' Malinin said. "It's the Olympics, and I think people only realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen from the inside. It was just something that overwhelmed me, and I felt like I had no control.''
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It is a strange tightrope if you think about it – to be so incredibly gifted that everyone presumes you will win, and yet in that very presumption is the biggest obstacle to keep you from winning.
With apologies to Thanos, both Malinin and Shiffrin seemed inevitable here.
Malinin took the ice in Milan having not lost a competition in more than two years. He held a commanding five-point lead heading into the free skate, a gap that only widened while his challengers skidded and fell before him. Average "Quad God" would have earned him a gold medal.
Instead, Malinin popped his quad axel, the beginning of four minutes that started to feel like rubbernecking a car accident. You didn't want to watch; you couldn't stop watching.
His failure in real time was somehow more jaw-dropping for its unexpected underperformance than his usual quad-popping is for its overperformance. "All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head," he said later.
Changing the narrative?
Malinin now has four long years to determine if this moment defines his career or not, something Shiffrin understands all too well. Four years ago, she entered six events in Beijing, a favored to medal in each. She failed to finish three races and didn't medal in the others. Much like Decker left on the track, Shiffrin's lasting imagine from 2022 was of her sitting in the snow, as if unsure what had just happened.
Which is what raised the stakes on Sunday, when she stepped into the starting gate for her portion of the alpine skiing women's team combined.
Gifted a first-place cushion by her downhill partner – gold medalistBreezy Johnson– Shiffrin, much like Malinin, only needed to be herself to secure gold. With108 World Cup victorieson Shiffrin's resume, 71 of them in the slalom, even her US teammate Jacqueline Wiles figured the day was as good as done. Clinging to third place and needing Shiffrin to fail to reach the podium, Wiles conceded, "We need a miracle.''
And then Shiffrin skied, tentatively and unassuredly. She didn't fall, she just failed to rise up to the moment. She finished 15th out of 18 skiers, her worst finish in more than 13 years and the tandem of Johnson and Shiffrin went from gold medal favorites to off the podium.
Taken in a vacuum, it would have been mystifying. Combined with Shiffrin's horrific Games in Beijing four years ago – three DNFs and three finishes off the podium in six events – it was fair to question if she had a sort of Olympic block.
Shiffrin has the blessing and the curse of two more tries. She gets the redo, but having failed already, that pressure she spoke of only grows. And her next event has been her recent nemesis: the giant slalom.
In November 2024, shesuffered what turned out to be a near life-threatening puncture woundduring a race in that event in Killington, Vermont. It left her with real trauma response and even when she returned to competition two months later, she struggled in the faster GS than in slalom. She went 12 races without reaching the podium, from January 2024 to the last GS race prior to the Olympics in January of this year, where she took bronze.
"I'm at a point now where I'm excited to ski fast in the GS,'' she said.
"There's maybe, you know, five turns in the course where I'm thinking that's enough. And that might not be anything about mental. That just might be that I don't particularly like to go that fast.''
If that doesn't go well, there is the slalom on Wednesday.
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