Canada’s Stephen Gogolev had a promising finish in figure skating while the men’s curling team remained undefeated on Day 7 of the Milan Cortina Olympic Games.
Gogolev, of Toronto, came fifth overall, attacking his free skate with three quad jumps and earned 186.37 points in that segment — second-best on the night — to close with 273.78, narrowly missing the podium by just over a point as the standings shifted around him.
In one of the biggest upsets in figure skating history, Malinin fell twice and made several other glaring mistakes, sending the “Quad God” tumbling all the way off the podium and leaving a star-studded crowd in stunned silence. And that cleared the way for Mikhail Shaidorov, the mercurial but talented jumping dynamo from Kazakhstan, to claim the first gold medal for his nation at these Winter Games.
The 21-year-old Shaidorov finished with a career-best 291.58 points, while Yuma Kagiyama earned his second consecutive Olympic silver medal and Japanese teammate Shun Sato took bronze.
The two-time world champion finished with 264.49 points, his worst total score in nearly four years, and one that ended a two-plus year unbeaten streak covering 14 full competitions.
“Honestly, I still haven’t been able to process what just happened,” Malinin said. “I mean, going into this competition, I felt really good this whole day. Feeling really solid. I just thought that all I needed to do was trust the process that I’ve always been doing.
“But it’s not like any other competition. It’s the Olympics,” he added, “and I think people (don’t) realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen from the inside. So it was really just something that overwhelmed me and I just felt like just I had no control.”
In men’s hockey, the dynamic duo of Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon each had a goal and two assists as Canada improved to 2-0 with a convincing 5-1 win over Switzerland.
Brad Jacobs kept the momentum going on the curling sheets, improving to 3-0 with an 8-6 win over Sweden.
On the women’s side, Rachel Homan dropped a 9-8 decision to American Tabitha Peterson in women’s curling round-robin play.
Meanwhile, Canada’s Ted-Jan Bloemen wrapped up his storied Olympic long-track speedskating career with a ninth-place finish in the men’s 10,000-metre event. The 39-year-old captured the gold medal in the event at Pyeongchang 2018 and won a silver in the men’s 5,000-metre race.
With files from The Associated Press
