The Definition of Menning

If you watch men’s figure skating long enough you will encounter a curious term: Menning. If there was an Oxford Dictionary of Sporting Terms, it would be defined as:

1. An erratic performance during a men’s figure skating competition, resulting in surprising final placements. Often characterized by multiple skaters demonstrating falls, pops, and total performance meltdowns.
2. To completely unravel in one’s program despite talent and training.

The accompanying photo would be either a summary of the 2014 Sochi Men’s free skate score sheet, or Denis Ten waving from the bronze medal step on the podium from the same competition. Now we need to update the reference photo on both counts.

Mikhail Shaidorov is the winner of the men’s singles figure skating title at the 2026 Olympic Winter Games. He is the first Olympic gold medalist from Kazakhstan in any figure skating discipline and the first Olympic medalist since the late, great Denis Ten won bronze in 2014 at Sochi. Sochi is a prime example of Menning, a competition so marred with falls and chaos that it’s the unofficial standard against which all other splatfests are measured (also in the running: 2018 Milan Worlds). Denis Ten’s bronze medal was also a shock: he skated early and well, took off his boots, and was nearly heading back to the village before he was pulled back into the rink as skater after skater fell apart. Tonight, Mikhail Shaidorov sat in the leader’s chair after a good skate early in the final flight and watched as skater after skater imploded before his eyes. First Adam Siao Him Fa, then Yuma Kagiyama, and then the Quad God himself, Ilia Malinin.

I wrote after the short program that it would take a fist crashing down from heaven for Ilia to lose this, and only Ilia himself could call down such punishment. The universe, it seems, it not without a sense of humour. I should know better than to taunt fate when a men’s competition is scheduled on Friday the 13th. But the fist did crash down from heaven, so let’s survey the damage.

What Went Wrong, or Once You Pop You Can’t Stop

Let’s lance this boil: Ilia Malinin’s performance was a disaster.

To understand why this went so badly for Ilia you need to understand the colossal gamble of his planned program content. Assuming the scheduled axel was intended as a quad, he had 7 quad jumps planned for this performance: axel, flip, loop, and salchow, plus a toe in combination and two quad lutzes (one stand-alone, one in combination). Remember: you can only repeat a triple or quad jump once, and the repeat must be in combination. This is outrageously ambitious tech content with no option for correction if any of those jumps fail.

Now, you might be thinking: but he landed three of those quads! That’s a lot of jumps! Surely that’s good, right?! And normally, you would be right! Three quads, some sturdy triples, and a grab bag of spins and step sequences would have been more than enough to win. But this is the Quad God and expectations were higher than Mount Olympus. Ilia had 4 other quads planned and all of them broke bad: a singled axel, doubled salchow and loop, and a lutz charged with a repetition error because it wasn’t completed in combination. Add in two falls and lost levels on spins and footwork and Ilia bled dozens of points over four and a half minutes.

Ilia’s trouble started early when he popped his opening axel. Most skaters have a pair of axels planned in the free skate. If you miss one there’s a backup slot, plus a place to stick a jump in combination if that sours, too. Skaters will often change their jumping passes on the fly to compensate for earlier errors—we saw a lot of re-choreographed jumping passes tonight—but that was nearly impossible for Ilia. Adding another axel attempt would mean taking a different, potentially more stable, quad jump out. The take-off pattern for an axel is difficult to swap in place of a loop or a salchow, which were his only realistic options because they weren’t planned in combination and would sacrifice less base value overall. He did not have options to adapt his jumping plan on the fly.

The second Ilia singled that axel he was in trouble, but not so much trouble that recovery was impossible. Ilia had 5.09 points on Yuma Kagiyama and 5.61 points on Adam Siao Him Fa at the start of the free skate, so one mistake would not be enough to lose the night. But the errors kept piling up: two falls and worse, more popped jumps. The doubled loop and salchow were the actual poison daggers that killed the Quad God tonight. In figure skating’s IJS rules, it is much better to fully rotate a jump and fall than to pop it. If you rotate and fall, you can at least score the base value of the jump. A popped jump is worth far fewer points. Hell, if Ilia had landed them as triples there might have been enough points to stay ahead of Mikahil Shaidorov (I’m sure someone will run a detailed rescoring to determine if that’s actually true). It wasn’t that a jump went wrong. Everything went wrong.

The second the music stopped everyone knew they had witnessed a disaster, especially the kid standing in the middle of it.

I have to give enormous credit to Ilia Malinin for holding his composure at the end of that program. Sobbing would have been an understandable reaction, and it looked like he sure did want to cry, but he faced his fate with admirable poise. The Quad God 15th placed in the free skate, 8th overall. His free skate segment score was 156.33, nearly 82 points off his PB score of 238.24 from earlier this season. He offered sincere congratulations to a stunned Mikhail Shaidorov and disappeared from camera view.

The Rollercoaster Keeps Running

Mikhail and Ilia weren’t the only skaters who had a wild night. The difference between the short program and free skate placements look like they were generated by a Magic 8 Ball shaken by a vengeful toddler. Stephen Gogolev, in the midst of a redemption season but by no means in the conversation for a medal, had the second best free skate of the night and finished fifth overall in his first Olympics. Shun Sato, devastated by his near miss at a team gold medal last week, wept with joy this week when he realized he won the bronze by surprise. Lukas Britschgi can now claim he’s placed higher than Ilia Malinin in a competition segment, a feat that surely entitles him to free fondue for life back home in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, Yuma Kagiyama experienced a speed run of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle in 10 minutes: hopes of winning gold crushed after his own flawed free program, resigned to earning a bronze medal at best, then finding himself in second place after all. Of all the skaters leaving the rink, Yuma might have the bitterest regrets. He commented to the press before the free skate that he would have to sweat blood to beat Ilia Malinin, but in the end, a mostly clean free skate would have sufficed. While Ilia wasn’t even in the same area code as the gold medal this Olympics, Yuma was at least on the same block. He accepted his silver medal with appreciation and grace (including a truly heartwarming moment with teammate Shun Sato that I insist you click here to watch), but I would be surprised if he doesn’t view that medal with at least a little disappointment.

Also disappointed, and likely more than a little haunted by what could have been: Adam Siao Him Fa. Adam is a wildly entertaining skater to watch with a total commitment to both the technique and the artistry of this sport, but the jumps abandoned him today. A bronze medal was his to lose, and he did, but he did not lose the crowd. Whatever the technical score, Adam did not waste a step of his choreography or lose a minute to self-pity during his performance. As we say in cycling, chapeau.

What’s Next!?

Mercifully for figure skating, Saturday is both a rest day and Valentine’s Day, giving us all a chance to eat an outrageous quantity of emotional support chocolate and feel completely justified in doing so. We return to competition on Sunday, February 15th, with the Pairs competition and heaven knows whatever fresh chaos has erupted between the time I finish writing this and skaters return to the ice. But until then: knife shoes out!