Former Olympian Brian Boitano analyzes the pressure faced by figure skater Ilia Malinin at the Olympics, exploring the mental challenges and strategies for overcoming them. The article highlights the importance of mental resilience and experience in high-stakes competitions, using Malinin's performance as a case study.
When it comes to Olympic sports, there’s something about figure skating that captures our collective imagination. There's plenty of beauty and eye-catching ability on display, but that’s balanced by what feels like impossibly high stakes.
For the most part, a figure skater is on the ice alone, being assessed by not only the judges, but the world.Ilia Malinin, the name that was on every American figure skating fan's lips , stumbled, falling short of a gold medal. But the pressure can also forge incredible results like Alysa Liu’s gold medal, which ended a two-decade drought for American women. As a former Olympian who reached the top spot on the podium, Brian Boitano also understands that environment."The pressure of an Olympic event is so huge that you are blindsided by the pressure,” he toldMaking Sense of Malinin Whether it’s fair or not, one of the major storylines to emerge from the 2026 Games was Malinin’s free skate. Rather than producing a crowning moment, the “Quad God” literally fell short. “All of this pressure, all of the media, and just being the Olympic gold hopeful was a lot,” he said after the event. “It was too much to handle.” The idea of pressure is more than familiar to Boitano, who skated in three Olympic Games. And, with his experience, he could see what was happening to Malinin. “When I watch a skater, I look at their face and I look their shoulders, I look at their body action, I look at their warm-ups, how they're treating the warm-up because I can actually pop into another skater's body and feel what they're feeling because I've felt everything that they are or could feel,” Boitano explained. “I know who they are, I know their personalities of performing, so I know what Ilia's face usually looks like. I can see the focus, how it usually looks in his eyes. I can read his face and any skater's face really just by sort of looking at them. Ilia came on the six-minute warmup and he was perfect. He literally didn't make a mistake. If you were judging that six-minute warmup, he would have got a monster score. He was so good. But as soon as he started, I noticed that he had a different kind of focus and he was breathing a little differently.”“He started having trouble, when he popped to the axel,” the 1998 gold medalist continued. “I talk about this snowball of negative talk that happens in a skater's head when they make one mistake. The biggest problem that they can have is if they can't stop that negative talk after the very first mistake because automatically this little voice comes in your head and says ‘It's over, it's over.’ I don't know if he had that voice happening then, but certainly a lot of skaters have had that, and then they kind of give up a little bit. "I don’t know if he had the voice after the quadruple axel, but I certainly think after the pop on the quad loop, then you start doing addition in your head and you're like, ‘Wow, I'm getting not hardly any points for those two jumping passes, and I need to rev it up. So I need to do stuff.’ You have this whole conversation in your head. And I think that he suffered from that night. I'm going to say it's probably the first time that that's ever happened to him.”So, how do you stop that snowball? As with most skills in sports, it comes down to a combination of skill and experience. Boitano named his snowball Murphy, after the idea of Murphy’s law and things potentially going wrong. And, over time, he learned how to respond when that voice spoke up. “You would nip it in the bud,” he explained. “So if Murphy would come in and say, I mean, I'll just use something as an example, ‘You're skating like crap,’ ‘Shut up, shut it up.’ I mean you would actually cut him down and order him away. Because the other thing too is for me, and I think for most people, you have to order the voice to stop. You are in control, it's your mind, and you are in control. You can't ask them to go away because Murphy's not going to go away. Murphy is going to stay. Because it is all your fears and your ego coming into play and they are trying to tear you down. It is trying to tear you down, so you have to order it back.” “So I would actually verbally say, ‘Back off, stay away, go away, go away’ and I would repeat it three times. Then I would reinforce it with a focus of my breath or a grounding to what I called the universe. Down, you know, my feet were underneath the ground. So, I was really grounded and I would be able to refocus myself after I got the voice away.” And, in the vein of refining those methods of stopping the snowball, Malinin will have to emerge from this experience with an understanding of why he stumbled and how to address those situations moving forward. “It should be a learning experience, and it will be a learning experience,” Boitano said. “The worst thing that a skater can do is just think it's a one-off and that, ‘It was just unusual and I'm back to clockwork and things are great. And I'm gonna just keep going and practicing and doing that without having any plan to advance mental strength.’ That would be a mistake, because the next time that Ilia goes for gold, it's going to be twice as strong.”Malinin wasn’t the only American skater to come up short in Italy, though. During her short program Amber Glenn popped her triple jump and only completed two revolutions. That left her with zero points for the element, and she ended up in tears. But that set the stage for an impressive rebound. Her free skate was the third best on the night and she finished in fifth place overall. The 26-year-old showed plenty of resilience, but, in Boitano’s mind, fighting back from an earlier session is different from fighting to stay atop the leaderboard; her situation wasn't exactly the same mental battle as Malinin's. “I think after the short program, she was angry at herself,” he said. “And she came out like a bull and she attacked the long program. There's a different situation that Ilia was in because he was in first. He was winning and all he could do was go down from there. All Amber was going to do is go up.... And a lot of skaters skate much better when they don't have something to lose that they have something gain. Skaters have a really great way of skating up when they are not happy with their short program. And that's exactly what Amber did. She delivered.”after speaking out about LGBTQ+ issues in the United States. Boitano, however, wasn’t surprised that she was willing to take that risk, even if it meant placing herself in an even brighter spotlight. “Amber's very brave. And I don't know if I would have been as brave as Amber in that situation. I don't think I would've have,” he said. “I was also two years younger than Amber. It was also a different time in our world. And I really have a lot of respect for her for adding on that element because it is a really difficult element to add on. Especially the amount of pressure that she was under for just skating alone. But now being under pressure for what she's saying and talking about and standing up for to go, to add that element of pressure onto what she already has, it is a very, very brave thing. And that's who Amber is. “She's a special, special person and a fantastic skater. She knows she's a smart, smart woman. She knew that this would add pressure, but it was willing to compromise her skating, to have an important voice in society. And I think that is equally what we should look at, apart from missing, or making a mistake on two jumps. I mean which is truly more important?”But the story of U.S. figure skating at the 2026 Olympics wasn’t all disappointment. Liu claimed the gold medal in women's singles, making her the first American woman to climb to the top of the podium since 2002. That’s impressive on its own, but the 20-year-old's journey only adds to the feat. She became the youngest U.S. champion in 2019, claiming the crown at age 13 but walked away from the sport in 2022 to “ on with her life.” But that wasn’t the end of the story. She put her skates back on in 2024, returning to the ice on her own terms. And, roughly two years later, she made it to the top of the Olympic mountain;“It is the biggest comeback in sports,” Boitano said. “I mean it is crazy what she did.”Her biggest impact, though, might be in how others view the sport. Glenn, for example, said she thought Liu will show others that you can approach figure skating in a healthy way without compromising your results. As someone who has been around the sport for decades, Boitano also believes there’s potential to make a set an example. “Absolutely, I see her making a difference,” he said. “I would love to encourage people to, the elite skaters like that I've talked to, the alumni, other Olympic champions were like, ‘Wouldn't it be so nice to come back and be able to take on our situation in skating as Alysa Liu and just be able skate for Olympic gold and not really care about the outcome, not have the pressure of the expectation of people and yourself?’ We all have gone into the Olympics feeling this immense pressure because we put it on ourselves. She removed that pressure from herself and she was like, ‘I'm going to just do it on my own terms.’” This is a great message for people, and this is important.” And, against the backdrop of an Olympics that’s been defined by performing under pressure, that message looms large. “ were very special people for a very special time in history,” Boitano added. “But I feel that group of women are an inspiration to other people, and hopefully other people will be more like them as far as sort of changing all of skating to be ‘Everybody's going to be like this.’ That will not happen, but hopefully more people can be encouraged to approach things in a way that is more important to them instead of feeling the pressure of the world on their shoulders.”
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