I am currently on an airplane, flying an almost straight line across the southern stretch of the country, hiding from the snow. I was meant to be going home to New York, but then of course the north and the east conspired to make a storm, so I am en route to Miami instead, where I will camp out for a few days at a friend’s house before making my way home. My plane is painted with the special Team USA Olympics livery—or at least the icon of the plane on the flight tracker is—which is apt timing, as I had been feeling a bit melancholy about the Olympics being over just this morning. 

Which is better than what I was feeling about the Olympics a few days ago: a sort of terror and shame about what befell (oof, fell) poor Ilia Malinin in the men’s long program. I was in Berlin, watching Peacock on a VPN, and had to cover my eyes and then, finally, close the tab with a shiver of dread and watch some inane cooking video on YouTube instead. (I am really into the Allrecipes videos right now, in which a woman named Nicole repeatedly dumps a bunch of cheese and taco meat into a slow cooker and calls it a day.) I felt truly frightened for Malinin’s mental health, and somewhat chagrined that I had been among the many touting his preordained success before he’d even skated once on Olympic ice. 

It’s true that some of Malinin’s haughty self-branding had bugged me, and I was a little put off by the slight tinge of hypebeast energy he puts out in interviews and on the ice. I suppose he’s just butcher and certainly more Gen Z than I am used to from my male figure skaters, so steeped am I in the glorious post-competitive lives of Johnny Weir and Adam Rippon. But yes, Malinin was not exactly my favorite skating personality at these games (there was a Canadian ice dancer I fell in love with instead), but I could still recognize that he is just 21 and had a heap of expectation on his shoulders and thus fell to earth that much harder. How sad, how destabilizing that must be for a tunnel-visioned kid who has been pointed in exactly one direction for his entire adolescence. It was miserable to think about, and so I turned away from the Olympics, tainted and stained by hubris as they suddenly seemed.