'I blew it': What happens when you fall short on the biggest sporting stage?

Milano, Italy – The roar inside the Milano Ice Skating Arena had already peaked when Ilia Malinin, the 21-year-old American hailed as the “Quad God,” glided to his starting pose for the final free skate of the Olympic men’s competition. Six nights earlier he had sealed team gold for the United States with a fearless performance; now, with individual gold on the line, the stakes felt heavier, the lights harsher, the ice colder. “All of the ups and downs of my life were suddenly replaying in my head,” Malinin admitted afterward. “It was loud. Overwhelming.”

He opened with a textbook quad flip, but the next element—a planned quad axel—deteriorated into a single. Two uncharacteristic falls followed, the second sending a fine spray of ice into the air like a sudden exclamation mark on a shattered dream. When the music stopped, Malinin buried his face in his hands; Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov would claim the title. “I blew it,” Malinin said quietly. “That’s honestly the first thing that came to mind.”

For figure skaters, no platform dwarfs the Olympic stage, and Malinin’s crash from heavy favorite to stunned fourth place is a stark reminder of how unforgiving that stage can be. “The pressure of the Olympics really gets you,” he reflected. “It’s unreal. It’s really not easy.”

He is hardly alone. Across sports, athletes who arrive at global championships carrying the weight of expectation often leave carrying something heavier: the memory of a single, defining miscue. The aftermath can echo for days, years, even decades.

Snowboard cross pioneer Lindsey Jacobellis knows the echo intimately. At the 2006 Turin Games she streaked to a 50-yard lead in the inaugural women’s final, victory all but secured. On the second-to-last jump she attempted a stylish Method grab—an instinctive celebration, she later said, of “sharing with the crowd my enthusiasm.” She landed off-balance, crashed, and watched Switzerland’s Tanja Frieden flash past for gold. Jacobellis picked herself up for silver, but headlines branded her a show-off who had thrown away victory. Hate mail arrived at her home; sponsors withheld bonus payments. “I was reminded of my mistake on a daily basis—on some days, on an hourly basis,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall. It would take 16 years, and a refusal to bow to outside narratives, before Jacobellis finally stood atop an Olympic podium, winning gold in Beijing at age 36.

Soccer legend Steven Gerrard’s scar tissue is similarly permanent. In April 2014, Liverpool entered the final weeks of the Premier League season on a 16-match unbeaten run and top of the table. Against Chelsea at Anfield, Gerrard miscontrolled a routine pass, slipped on the turf, and saw Demba Ba race clear to score. Chelsea won 2-0; Manchester City pipped Liverpool to the title by two points. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about what if that didn’t happen,” Gerrard later told BT Sport. “Inside it kills me and it will do for a long time.”

Cricketer Simon Kerrigan’s wound was inflicted even more swiftly. Selected for his only Test in the 2013 Ashes finale at The Oval, the left-arm spinner was thrashed for 53 runs in eight overs by Shane Watson and never bowled again in the match. He was not picked for England again, and when a squad recall for a 2014 Test at Lord’s was announced during a county game, the accompanying media glare triggered such anxiety that he withdrew. “Since that day, bowling has never been the same,” Kerrigan admitted upon retiring in 2023. “A little part of me feels I wish they could” take the cap away, he said, despite well-meaning assurances that “they can’t take it away from you.”

Yet the ledger of public failure is not exclusively a tale of lifelong regret. German golf great Bernhard Langer missed a six-foot par putt on the final hole of the 1991 Ryder Cup that would have retained the trophy for Europe; the Americans celebrated their first triumph since 1983. One week later Langer faced a 15-foot putt merely to reach a playoff at the German Masters. “My first thought was, ‘You just missed a six-footer a week ago,’” he recalled. “So I walked around for a moment and said to myself, ‘Don’t go there.’” He holed the putt and won the playoff, evidence that rapid redemption is possible.

Amanda Anisimova supplied a more recent example. Thrashed 6-0, 6-0 by Iga Świątek in the 2025 Wimbledon final, the American returned 53 days later to defeat the same opponent in the U.S. Open quarter-finals. “At the end of the day, to me it was just tennis,” she said of the Wimbledon debacle, crediting her ability to separate result from identity for the turnaround.

Performance psychologist Sarah Murray, who spent nine years inside a Premier League club, argues that such separation is essential. “Perceived failure on the world stage is public and permanent and it can feel identity-threatening,” she explains. “The really important thing in order to come back is the separation of that sense of personal failure from personal worth.”

Whether redemption arrives within days, as it did for Langer and Anisimova, or requires the slow grind Jacobellis endured, the path inevitably begins with the same stark admission Malinin delivered in Milan: “I blew it.” What follows—lifetime scar or springboard—depends on how completely an athlete can reframe the story. For Malinin, the next chapter is unwritten; for others, the lesson is already clear: the biggest stage giveth, and the biggest stage taketh away, but it rarely allows its protagonists to forget.