There’s an American figure skater named Ilia Malinin, now perhaps better known, thanks to the brisk exposure of this year’s Winter Olympics, by his self-bestowed nickname—the Quad God. He’s from a town whose name straddles the Old World and the New: Vienna, Virginia. The kid’s only twenty-one years old. He’s got a mane of blond hair, blue eyes set close together under a dark brow, and a free, wild way of leaping, as if catapulted from the ice. Before the Winter Games began, in early February, he’d already won a world championship and a handful of other accolades. And so he was a favorite to win gold, both as a solo act and in the free-skate segment of the U.S. team event.
But competition sometimes stymies talent. That’s why we undergo the increasingly hunterly process of watching—tracking the events in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on NBC and Peacock, streaming the highlights of a number of snowy sports—instead of accepting each sure-sounding prediction as a fait accompli. On February 13th, for his free skate, Malinin glided out onto the ice wearing a sheer shirt with sequins studded in the shape of a blooming flame; the sleeves flowed past his wrists and sheathed both of his hands, like a pair of stockings masquerading as mittens. Before his music began, a voice boomed over the rink’s speakers: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Away he went, with his usual slick velocity. Every four years, I have to learn again what a “quad flip” is. Malinin swept himself up into one—an efficient, twisting spiral just above the surface of the ice. He looked good. But then, trying a quadruple axel—a maneuver once considered impossible by the sport’s aristocracy—something wobbled in his mechanics, and he made only one rotation. His left leg flailed a bit in the air. Another mistake came shortly after. Malinin stuck a double loop instead of a quadruple, groupings of four now evading him at every turn. “We don’t usually see Ilia make mistakes like this,” a commentator said. You could see Malinin sigh, trying to shake his nerves.
But on his next big jump he took a spill. The crowd, still cheering, sounded slightly hollow. What was going on? Before the routine ended, Malinin fell again, as if eager to confirm that, yes, his moment of glory had become a real disaster. The Olympics, with their nationalistic gloss, lend themselves to symbolic readings. And, sure, it was hard to watch the anguish on Malinin’s face after he’d finished and not think of the country whose flag he’d come to represent—young, vigorous, heedlessly unfearful, and now flaming out suddenly, plummeting down the rankings. Malinin ended the event in eighth place.
Of course, it wasn’t just Malinin whose performance tugged my attention away from Italy and toward America. A handful of athletes from the States have spoken up, less in righteous indignation than in baffled concern, about American politics these days. The curler Rich Ruohonen—who, when he’s not winning tournaments, works as a personal-injury lawyer—spoke at a press conference about ICE’s outrageous behavior in Minneapolis. “I’m proud to be here to represent Team U.S.A., and to represent our country,” he said. “But we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention what’s going on in Minnesota and what a tough time it’s been for everybody. This stuff is going on right around where we live.” Looking like he might cry, he stopped to issue a few jagged breaths before he went on. “I am a lawyer,” he said, “and we do have—we have a constitution, and it allows us freedom of the press, freedom of speech, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and makes it that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. And what’s happening in Minnesota is wrong.”
It was a startling thing, this impromptu civics lesson, offered in the middle of an international sporting occasion. The Olympic organizers have gone to great and sometimes absurd pains to excise political messaging from the Games. The Haitian team was made to remove an image of Toussaint Louverture from its uniforms, which reproduced a portrait by the celebrated artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. The eighteenth-century revolutionary’s horse remained, riderless, backgrounded by bright-green leaves and a tangy blue sky. The Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from his event for wearing a black-and-white helmet depicting athletes killed in Russia’s war of aggression against his homeland.
But the Americans couldn’t totally suppress their sour mood. Hunter Hess, a skier, made a useful distinction between the flag stitched onto his clothes and the vision of his country that lives in his heart and mind. “Just because I wear the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” he said. Donald Trump responded on Truth Social: “U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”
As if attempting to display all this tumult on the slopes, the forty-one-year-old skier Lindsey Vonn crashed violently after her pole hooked a gate during the women’s downhill race. Only nine days prior, she’d torn her A.C.L. The pride it had taken to race anyway felt like an echo—or a symptom—of the national character. Her legs bent horribly, as if in flight, one from the other. Even over the broadcast, you could hear her howl.
Sometimes the national angle on the proceedings had a happier slant. Take the case of Francesca Lollobrigida, the thirty-five-year-old Italian speed skater who won gold in the women’s three-thousand-metre and five-thousand-metre races. In the three thousand, you could see the home-town crowd—its delight at her presence, its hope for her victory—urging her forward in the final third of the race. She’d started out aggressively, and it seemed like her energy should have been about to wane. Instead, she surged. After she won, she searched the crowd for her cute young son, Tommaso. She’d done it for him, for the nation.
Winter sports appear to flow naturally from the landscapes that act as their settings. The existence of a steep slope, lost in powder, seems to cry out for a reckless ski jump or a series of ramp-enhanced snowboard tricks. Hockey and speed skating and figure skating all point to the reality of the pond—frozen over, sturdy enough to hold a human body. Even the bobsled, that vehicle for the death wishes of puppyish youths, has a kind of intuitive connection to the fear and the thrill we feel while gliding or slipping on the ice. Cross-country skiers, heaving and snotting, look like packs of unusually fit travellers, perhaps chasing down a warm meal to curb the fatal chill of a long winter.
This illusion of the “natural”—more than the thrill of one event or another—is what makes the Winter Olympics pleasurable to watch. The season’s sports look like they require too much money and too much time for the average person to learn, much less master. The American snowboarder Chloe Kim, that alpine Hells Angel: How does she do it? I watched her spin in the air more times than I could count, landing in the middle of a parabolic curve of the board. To follow her body as she flings it skyward is to draw many invisible squiggles with your mind—a kind of retinal graffiti across the natural majesty of the mountain.
Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, a cross-country skier from Norway, shucked his way uphill at a pace that seemed impossible; later, it was confirmed that he’d been hauling ass up a hill at the pace of a sub-six-minute mile. Almost every time somebody in that sport crosses the finish line, they immediately crumple, gasping, to the ground. They look like they’re about to give up the ghost, which makes sense in a way that the endeavor itself really doesn’t. Klæbo’s rabid climb was almost sinister, a Newtonian affront against gravity and the native difficulty of hills.
Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, a French ice-dancing duo, beat an American team made up of Madison Chock and Evan Bates. The victory was controversial; many onlookers thought the judges had robbed the Americans. The French insisted that their routine had a high level of difficulty and that they had been rewarded justly. Having no grounding in the aesthetics or the hierarchies of the sport, I couldn’t really tell what the fuss was about. I’ll admit that I enjoyed the French duo more, simply because of the confident elegance with which they’d taken their positions. They moved in swanning semicircles around the rink, making bold eye contact with onlookers, offering a foretaste of their uncanny coördination with each other even before their bodies had commenced their true engagement. Their elegance looked to me like an easy comfort with—a surrender to—the antifriction of the ice.
Long bouts of exposure to the wild sometimes drive men crazy. You know the archetype—frozen beard and frantic eyes, a raving, paranoid quality of speech. Maybe this explains the bizarre case of the Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid. After nabbing a bronze medal in the twenty-kilometre biathlon, Lægreid took an interview that quickly became a tearful monologue, not about his sport but about personal matters. Six months ago, he said, he’d met the love of his life. Three months later, amid the chaos of new love and the strictures of training for the Olympics, he’d found time to cheat on his object of affection. “I made my biggest mistake,” he said, choking on tears.
“Sport has come second these last few days,” he said. (Was this a parenthetical excuse for coming in third?) “My only way to solve it is to tell everything and put everything on the table and hope that she can still love me,” he continued. “I have nothing to lose.”
Nothing but his dignity—and the privacy of his already wounded beloved. In the space of a few minutes, Lægreid had managed to make not only the biathlon but the entirety of the Olympics about himself. I felt a pang of sympathy for the guy. He reminded me of an American. ♦