That was the heartbreakingly honest response Ilia Malinin, our Team USA “Quad God” figure skater gave in an interview, mere moments after the gold medal favorite finished his disastrous free skate program on Friday.

But the first thing he did after “blowing it” was hug his rival — the man who was taking home the medal Ilia traveled to Milan to capture — and say:

My first career wasn’t in business — it was in competitive figure skating.

And I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of the sport that kick-started my life.

👉 No one else in the world understands your life as much as your greatest opponents. 

👉 Smart competitors know those relationships are a gift.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

I was the one with the glow-in-the-dark jump rope. That made me a god.

All summer long, while the rest of Florida sweltered, my friends and I retreated to a 50-degree metal box for 10 weeks of training camp. Our sanctum contained a 20,000 square-foot sheet of ice (3,000 square feet bigger than any other sheet of ice in Florida — Olympic size.)

Our blades hit the ice at 5:30am for 30-minutes of compulsory school figures, a lost practice of slow and precise edges and turns, judged by the quality of the markings the skater leaves on the ice.

And unlike other figure skating disciplines, where judges perch comfortably on the sidelines, evaluating performances from behind the steam radiating from their coffee, those who judge figures walk out on the ice with delicate horse-hair brushes and magnifying glasses to scrupulously examine your etchings. 

Can you imagine anything more anxiety-inducing at 5:30 in the morning?

But although figures had been eliminated as an Olympic requirement by the time I entered the sport in the 90s, my coach insisted that her pupils practice them, and submit for testing. There was a right way to do this shit. And she wasn’t going to let standards slip.

After figures, we’d get our blood pumping for the next couple of hours, training our jumps, our spins, our footwork, and our power before the best part of our morning: breakfast break.

It was a full 30-minute break, but we’d scarf down our Pop-Tarts in one minute flat, and rush to an empty locker room where my glow-in-the-dark jump rope performed its most important job of the day — wrapped around whoever was “it” in our game of dark tag.

Because… we were kids.

We squealed and darted around the pitch-black windowless room, with nothing in our vision except the pale green glow illuminating from the jump rope tied around someone’s waist. 

Finally, a sliver of blinding light would cut through the darkness as somebody’s mom cracked open the door and shouted “Time to get your skates back on!”.

Back on the ice we’d go, training our tushies off for the rest of the morning.

Miss a jump in your program? You’d be ordered to skate 10 laps right after the music finished, already breathless, and on legs that felt like Jello.

Cut a lap short? That would earn you 20 pushups, center ice.

Collapse after 12 pushups? Alright, now everyone is lined up next to you, hands frozen into the ice, toe-picks holding a steady plank, completing the remaining eight pushups at a team.

We may have been adversaries at competition, but at training camp, we were bosom buddies.

The afternoon was reserved for off-ice training. Ballet. Yoga. Calisthenics. Weightlifting. Even rock climbing. If it improved strength, flexibility, or movement, we were doing it.

One particularly ruthless trainer even had us doing walking lunges around the entire perimeter of the building — on scorched pavement in the unforgiving Florida sun. We went from frostbitten fingers to puking from heat exhaustion. 

Think this all sounds like child abuse? You’re wrong. We were having the time of our lives, surrounded by our best friends, and achieving physical feats that our bullies at school could never dream of. 

This was probably the most unique thing about our situation—

We were Floridians. 

Unlike the frozen tundras of the Midwest or New England — where every mother’s birth canal is biologically altered to enable babies to be born with skates already strapped to their tiny feet — ice skating was a complete novelty in my home town.

And we weren’t simply ice skating. We were throwing ourselves into double and triple jumps with the grace of a ballerina, and the stamina of a goddamn racehorse. 

We were all gods.

By the time I was six years old, and had never seen snow, my Detroit-born father decided, “Enough is enough, my kids need a romp in the white stuff”.

And off we went on the only recreational family vacation we ever took. (After that, our travel budget was bled dry from my figure skating competitions and my brother’s hockey tournaments). 

Our destination was a mountain resort in North Carolina — the kind of place where we were guaranteed to see snow, regardless of whether or not it actually fell from the sky, because they were making it for skiing.

That was a good call. There was absolutely no natural snow to be found. 

So we frolicked at the base of the bunny hill, making snow angels, avoiding the skiers, and having the wintery fun experience my parents had planned for us. Mission accomplished.

Until one day we went for a drive, and stumbled upon a towering mound of snow near the road. Weird… where did that come from?

Turns out, we had found an ice rink. And not a stinky hockey arena — a beautiful outdoor rink, nestled in the mountains.

After a few minutes of watching us climb the Zamboni snow hill, my folks decided that it might be fun to throw their Florida beach kids on the ice rink to metaphorically “sink or swim”.

We walked in, and were surprised to have the place to ourselves. My parents bought skating tickets and rented us little skates. The sweet man working there said, “Don’t worry, I’ll refund you if the kids don’t like it. They’re a little young for this.”

Two hours later, they were dragging me and my four-year-old brother off the ice, kicking and screaming. No refunds were needed. We were both obsessed from the moment we stepped foot on the ice. 

I wanted to figure skate. My brother wanted to play hockey. And over the next few years, my parents made incredible sacrifices to get us into lessons and help us gain the foundational skills we would need to enter those sports — in a place where ice was sparse, and wickedly expensive.

Then one day we learned of a real estate developer who was considering building an ice rink in our town. Holy shit. That would be a game-changer for us.

So my parents reached out to him, offering their support.

That offer of support turned into them getting hired to run the place… Then taking over an ownership stake in the project… And finally buying it out entirely. 

We became the ice rink owners. This enabled my brother and me to pretty much live on the ice for the next decade, excelling in sports that shaped our entire future.

Thank god we ran into that mound of Zamboni snow in North Carolina.

I’m going to spoil it for you—

None of us ever competed at the Olympics. None of us even came close.

Partly because it’s a wildly competitive sport and we simply weren’t good enough, but also because it was an era of pubescent champions. Oksana Baiul was 16 when she took home Olympic gold in 1994, followed by two Americans who we all looked up to with stars in our eyes — 15-year-old Tara Lipinski in 1998, and 16-year-old Sarah Hughes in 2002.

With this trend of teenie bopper champions came an attitude of, “Oh, you’re 14 and haven’t qualified for Nationals yet? It’s already too late for you.”

All it took was one injury, and suddenly you had missed your chance. At least, that’s what happened to me.

Two weeks before I was slated to compete at Regional Championships (the first round of qualifying events for Nationals), I fell in training on the only triple jump in my program — a Salchow — and broke my hip.

I was 13 years old.

I fought the pain, gobbling up Advil like jelly beans, and got on the plane to compete at Regionals in Pittsburgh. I skated like shit, of course, and didn’t qualify for the following round.

The doctor told me I needed to take a year off skating to recover. I didn’t listen. I caused even more damage to my hips — damage that is still plaguing me to this day.

But I kept pushing myself… Summer training camps… Hours of practice before school… Competitions… Until the outcomes I had dreamt of were officially out of reach, and I retired from competitive skating at the washed-up old age of 16.

If the goal was a trip to the Olympics — I blew it.

And my friends? The ones who lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with me, performing pushups in the middle of the ice? The ones who actually showed up to my birthday party when my school friends cruelly bailed at the last minute? The ones who I fiercely competed against, then went out for pizza with an hour later?

They all experienced similar endings to their figure skating careers.

But they grew into remarkable f*cking humans.

Let’s look at Brittany and Joanna — my two closest skating friends. Brittany worked her ass off to become a doctor at an esteemed hospital, and Joanna is a successful entrepreneur. I beam with pride every time I think about them.

And me? I can trace every morsel of success I’ve achieved in my life back to figure skating. The discipline. The work ethic. The constant cycle of “preparation, execution, review”.

But more importantly, figure skating taught me how to fail — gracefully. And even in those painful moments of failure, to support your friends/opponents. No one else in the world understands your life in the same way they do. The depth of those relationships far outweighs the rivalry of competition.

Ilia Malinin, objectively the best figure skater of all time, failed on Friday. And his first instinct was to support his friend — the man who had beaten him.

I think we can all learn something from that.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin

I’d like to dedicate today’s issue to my life-changing coach, Sharon Martens. She drew the best out of us — as athletes, and as humans. Love you always, Big Red.