MILAN (AP) — Ilia Malinin beat Japanese rival Shun Sato in a head-to-head showdown at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Sunday night, helping the U.S. defend its team figure skating gold medal by breaking a deadlock with Japan in the final session of the competition.
The 21-year-old nicknamed the “Quad God” landed five quadruple jumps and scored 200.03 points for his free skate, atoning for his mediocre short program — at least by his lofty standards — one night earlier. Sato followed him with three quads in his program, but he could only manage 194.86 points, leaving the Japanese with a second straight silver medal in the team event.
The U.S. ended up on 69 points while Japan finished with 68. Matteo Rizzo delivered one of the best free skates of his career as Italy was trying to hold onto the bronze medal, allowing the host nation to finish third with 60 points.
Georgia wound up fourth with 56. It still has never medaled in any sport at the Winter Games.
The U.S. had a five-point lead over Japan after two days of competition. But the advantage dwindled to nothing when world champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara won the pairs free skate and Kaori Sakamoto won the women's free skate earlier Sunday night.
Leave it to the best closer in the business to deliver for the Americans.
Malinin opened with a big quad flip, opted for a safer triple axel over his quad, and overcome a couple of mistakes along the way to finish with aplomb. The son of Olympic skaters Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov ended with back-to-back combos, a quad toe-triple flip and a quad salchow-triple axel, leaving a crowd full of American and Japanese fans roaring in approval.
Sato did everything he could to give Japan a chance.
From his opening quad lutz to his finishing triple lutz, the Japanese star was nearly perfect, producing an easier but cleaner program than Malinin had earlier. He pumped his fist the moment his music ended, then had to wait to hear whether it was enough.
It wasn't quite.
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The pairs were first on the ice Sunday night, and Ellie Kam and Danny O'Shea delivered the best free skate of their pairs career when the U.S. needed it the most, beating the Canadians to avoid dropping a much-needed point to the winning Japanese pairs team.
Kam and O'Shea scored 135.36 points for their program, which opened with “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics and finished with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. Miura and Kihara won the segment with a career-best of their own of 155.55 points, pulling the Japanese to within two points of the Americans with two events remaining.
“We couldn’t be more proud to be able to perform under what we felt was so much energy,” said the 34-year-old O’Shea, who was an Olympic alternate in 2018 but is making his debut at the Winter Games. "We walked into the day, walked into the rink with positive emotions, with an offensive attitude, and that showed out there on the ice."
Then the women took the stage with the U.S. swapping out world champion Alysa Liu for Amber Glenn.
The three-time national champion spun out of her opening triple axel, the most difficult triple jump and one only she tried among the women, and Glenn had to add a late double toe loop after missing an earlier triple as part of a combination. Those two mistakes, and a couple of other errors along the way, left her with 138.62 points — and more crucially, third in the segment.
Kaori Sakamoto, the individual bronze medalist at the Beijing Games, won the free skate with 148.62 points, pulling Japan into a tie for the lead. Anastasiia Gubanova took second in the free skate as she tried to keep Georgia in the race for bronze.
“It wasn’t how I wanted to feel,” Glenn said afterward. “The adrenaline was really up and I think I just crashed a little bit.”
Malinin was there to pick her and the rest of the American team up.
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