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6 hours ago
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Ilia Malinin bounced back from his disappointment at this year’s Winter Olympics by leading after the short program at the figure skating world championships on Thursday.
Malinin, sporting a new haircut, gave fans what they expected from the defending two-time world champion at O2 Arena in Prague.
The performance showed the Olympic failure was behind him. He will go to Saturday’s free skate with a massive lead of more than nine points after a personal-best 111.29 score in the short program.
Known as the Quad God, Malinin opened with a quad flip and a combination of quad lutz and a triple toe loop. The only skater to have successfully landed a quad axel in competition performed only a triple version of his trademark jump.
French skater Adam Siao Him Fa nailed a perfect quad toe loop in combination with a triple toe loop plus a quad salchow for 101.85 points. Aleksandr Selevko of Estonia was a surprise third after a personal best 96.49.
Malinin helped the US win the team gold in Milan and was heavily favored to win individual gold with an unrivaled program. His five-point lead over Kagiyama and Siao after the short program seemed insurmountable. But in one of the biggest upsets in figure skating history, Malinin fell twice and made other glaring mistakes in a disastrous free skate, falling from first to eighth place.
The 21-year-old said he succumbed to the pressure at his first Games. “The nerves just went, so overwhelming,” he said at the time, “and especially going into that starting pose, I just felt like all the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head. So many negative thoughts that flooded into there and I could not handle it.”
Olympic champion Mikhail Shaidorov from Kazakhstan is skipping this week’s competition.
