CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — When Ilia Malinin fell repeatedly Friday night on the world's biggest figure skating stage at the Milan Cortina Games, the 21-year-old known as the Quad God was starting a painful journey that many great Olympic athletes have been forced to endure.
"It actually bears a lot of similarities to grief," said Dr. Sahen Gupta, a sports performance psychologist and researcher at the University of Portsmouth, who works with elite athletes including Olympians.
"Malinin did amazingly in terms of how he handled everything after [his eighth-place performance]," Gupta said. "But in his post-match interview he talked about being in shock and that's one of the first responses we get when we are in grief. It's like, Oh my God, what happened here?"
A pantheon of rockstar-level U.S. Olympians — gymnast Simone Biles, figure skater Nathan Chen, alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin — have experienced these cruel moments. After years of training and performing with consistent brilliance in high-level competitions, they reach the Olympic stage and everything goes wrong.
There are names for these stumbles in the sports world: "You know, yips or twisties, these are actually very highly studied. The technical term for that is performance failure, or performance blocks," Gupta said
Why do the yips and twisties seem to happen more often on the Olympic stage? Experts say part of the challenge is simply the fierce public attention and media scrutiny.
"If you are a medal contender that gets profiled, that gets shared [on social media], that really draws a spotlight," said Tracey Devonport, a sports psychologist at Hartpury University.
The greats who've fallen before
The similarity of athletes' stumbles at the Olympics can be uncanny. Leading into the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, Chen — like Malinin — was widely profiled. He was described as the Ice Prince by Time Magazine and featured in an NBC Super Bowl commercial. Then Chen skated out for his short program and it was a disaster. He fell and stumbled through the routine.
"I did all the right things going into it, it should have been different," he lamented at the time, acknowledging that the pressure of the Games weighed heavily.
Speaking after Malinin's faltering performance with Yahoo News, Chen voiced compassion and said he knows first-hand that once a routine begins to unravel before an Olympic-size audience, it's difficult to recover. "I remember when I went in my first jump and I fell, the crowd goes Ooh! That just hurts you to your gut," he said.
Four years of work, one chance to get it right
Sports psychologists told NPR it's not only the glare of media attention and massive global audiences that can throw athletes off balance at the Olympics. Another factor is the narrow window for success. Athletes get one chance to peak. Failure can have massive consequences.
"This is what we characterize as an acute and immediate stress environment," said Gupta. "In most [Olympic] sports, it about a ten-minute period every four years. That's when you're actually competing in the finals for the medals."
A growing number of athletes competing at the Olympic level do their best to prepare mentally for these make-or-break moments of competition. They work with therapists and focus on meditation and mindfulness, as well as conditioning and technique.
"It's a bit like an accelerator on a car, you've got to get it just right," said Devonport. "You don't want to be too relaxed, but you don't want to be too nervous. And everybody's different, that's the beauty of it. Everybody operates best at a different [emotional] level."
Even with the best preparation, there's a sure-fire formula to avoid the yips and twisties. Biles, widely considered the greatest gymnast of all time, withdrew from competition at the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo after struggling with the twisties.
A year later, during a season in which she won the overall World Cup, Shiffrin erred repeatedly in her strongest events at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games and left empty-handed.
"You feel there like you're stranded and isolated," said Shiffrin, during an episode of her podcast that dropped last month, where she was joined by Biles, who responded, "Yes, and I see me in her [Shiffrin] and I know exactly how she's feeling."
During their conversation, Biles said seeing Shiffrin experience the yips was agonizing. "I'm just watching and I'm just, No, it's happening! I just wanted to cry and I was so emotional."
The yips and twisties often lead to triumph but it's a hard road
Once things go wrong during an Olympic performance, psychologists who work with elite athletes say the next challenge is helping them begin to recover and heal.
According to Gupta, offering counseling in the first days after a performance failure can be crucial.
"We are sort of really trying to ride out the waves of emotion, because it's really complicated," he said. "A really critical part is not to be isolating yourself."
Dr. Carla Meijen, a sports psychologist and athletic performance researcher at the University of Amsterdam said athletes entering these high-stakes Games need to prepare by surrounding themselves with support.
"You need to have an environment around you where no matter what the outside world is saying, you know, they've got your back," Meijen said.
Every expert interviewed by NPR agreed that one remarkable — and hopeful — aspect of this painful experience is that it often ends in triumph.
Shiffrin is still seeking her golden moment at these Milan Cortina Games after failing to get on the podium in the giant slalom Monday. But Biles and Chen bounced back from their collapses. Chen soared in Beijing four years ago, capturing two gold medals. Biles dominated in Paris in 2024, capturing three gold medals and one silver.
According to Devonport, once the raw wounds of an Olympic collapse begin to heal, the experience can help make an athlete stronger and more resilient. "What can we learn? What do we need to do differently next time?" she said. "Athletes quite often turn that failure into success, because that really does fuel the fire."
Malinin, at age 21, leaves these Games with only one team gold medal. But after a bitter Olympics when the yips hit hard, he said he has already begun processing and rebuilding. "You have to take what happened, or what you've learned from this, and really just change or decide what you want to do for the future," he said.
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