Maybe Ilia Malinin Should Retire and Teach Swimming

It worked for an earlier gold medalist.

True story, I was taught how to swim by the youngest gold medalist in the history of Olympic speed skating. Her name is Anne Henning and she won gold in the 500 meters and silver in the 1000 meters at the 1972 Sapporo games at 16-years-old.¹

She retired from speed skating at 16 as the current world record holder in the 500 meters, and a few years later had a summer job trying to teach this poor creature how to swim.

As you can see by the combo platter of floatation vest and ring, I did not take to the water with great enthusiasm. Who knows why? Maybe it was because I had an older brother who was a competitive swimmer and I’d already decided that part of my personality was going to be looking at whatever he was good at (swimming, school, etc…) and saying to myself, “not that.”

I would’ve been too young to know for sure, but it seems like no one made a tremendous fuss about Anne Henning’s choice to retire from speed skating at the top of the game. Today, a 16-year-old gold medalist is looking at making lots of dough in endorsements and would be, at least for a period of time, world famous, but back then when these sports were truly amateur competitions. This was just a young person of talent and drive who was ready to do something else.

This is not intended as a lament about a changed world. I mean, if you asked a teenage gold medalist today if they’d rather keep skating in order to reap the rewards of their hard work and success or if they’d like to retire and go teach little dorks who wear a vest and floatation ring in the pool how to swim, you wouldn’t get the question out before everyone started laughing, but you have to wonder if it might not still be the right choice for some people who find themselves in a similar circumstance.

Alysa Liu, the gold medal winning figure skater, was retired from her sport from 2022 to 2024, announcing in 2022 that she’d accomplished all she’d set out to do and she’d had enough.

Very Anne Henning of her.

She went to college and did regular college student stuff and says she didn’t skate at all for a couple of years until she recognized that she could go back to the sport with the attitude and agency necessary to succeed - success not being a gold medal - but to genuinely enjoy the process.

The margins in these competitions are wafer thin, so a single bobble could have sent Liu off the podium entirely, but it seems clear that seizing her internal agency is the predicate to her external success and, long term, that internal agency is going to serve her better in more important ways than that gold medal.

Prior to the Olympics I had been led to believe that Ilia Malinin (The Quad God) was an inevitable gold medalist for men’s figure skating. At Slate, writing in advance of the free skate, Chris Schleicher declared Malinin “unbeatable.” Recognizing the fate-tempting nature of this statement Schleicher doubled-down:

As a figure skating expert, I feel it is my responsibility to tell you that Malinin is unbeatable. On the other hand, I feel a bit like I’m a shipbuilder calling the Titanic unsinkable. We make proclamations, and the gods laugh at us. Yes, yes, and I say this rolling my eyes, “anything is possible.” So, sure, a meteorite from Ilia’s home planet could strike him down and knock him out of the competition. But if he skates like he’s been skating all season, he has room to make mistakes and still win gold. But apart from the Quad God, there were a lot of other spectacular skates in Milan on Tuesday.

I watched Malinin skate the long program live and it was truly sick-making to witness a human being falling apart in real time, particularly because of the weight of the narrative that preceded the skate. Malinin was inevitable, until he wasn’t.

Watching these Olympics I have struggled with the effect of the narrative on my enjoyment in experiencing the athletic performances. I wonder also if the weight of the pre-competition narrative isn’t harming the athletes subject to the narrative.

Mikaela Shiffrin is the greatest skier in the history of her sport, period. And yet, I was led to believe that if she failed to win a gold this year, somehow her life would be incomplete. The narrative of her victory is a kind of redemption, but in what world does the greatest ever at her sport need redeeming?

I was listening to a podcast in advance of the women’s hockey final between the United States and Canada and the hosts were explicitly framing the contest around competing narratives of whether the Americans could get over the Olympic hump, or if Canadian captain Marie-Philip Poulin would cement her status as the greatest women’s player of all-time by returning from an earlier injury at the Games and leading the Canadians to another gold.

The Americans won the game with a thrilling play in overtime, a three-quarter rink pass from Taylor Heise followed by an amazing couple of dekes around the defender and then to beat the goalie by Megan Keller. But if you watched the game, you will realize that both of those pre-game narratives are true, regardless of the outcome.

For sure there’s an “old-man yelling at clouds” aspect to what I’m saying. It’s not like narratives attached to sports, particularly the Olympics, are new, but I do think in the past we let the events determine the narrative, rather than pre-writing them for the sake of goosing attention across the media.

The 1980 Miracle on Ice story was not framed as a potential “miracle” prior to the game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Even the whole capitalists vs. communists narrative was spun up in hindsight. In the 1970s and 1980s it was pretty clear that if outstanding hockey was your goal, Soviet-style communism was superior to the West’s freedom. The Canadian pros would’ve been exposed in the 1972 Summit Series, an 8-game exhibition between the best Canadian NHL’ers and the Soviet national squad if Bobby Clarke didn’t fracture the ankle of the Soviet star, Valeri Kharlamov, with a blatant slash. Prior to the series the Canadians were expected to embarrass the Soviets, but they squeaked through winning four, losing three and tying one, winning the last three games following Kharlamov’s injury.

Clarke is still viewed as a hero by many for his deliberate injuring of Kharlamov, a narrative of democracy winning over communism, but without that frame it would just be one of the biggest cheap shots in the history of sports.

In that 1980 miracle, the U.S. team’s success was significantly predicated on coach Herb Brooks stealing the U.S.S.R.’s style of play and adopting it for North America.

But whatever. You show me the footage of Al Michaels shouting “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” and I’m as red white and blue as anyone. I am ignoring the Trump-friendly nature of a number of the American players on the Olympic team, most notably the Tkachuk brothers who were described by someone on social media as “what would helped if hog neck meat almost gained sentience,” which…yeah, that tracks.²

I don’t want to think about how some people will believe that a U.S. victory somehow validates Trump and Trumpism, one, because it will ruin any pleasure I may take in the occurrence, and two, because it’s ridiculous. If the U.S. wins it’s because 20 years ago some U.S. hockey people decided that if we put some resources towards identifying the best young hockey players in the nation and gave them the competition to develop we might achieve par with Canada, and it’s essentially happened.

Anyway. Consider this a deep hockey history newsletter now.

Unlike hockey, which I will watch, regardless of quality or stakes, I do not care about figure skating at all, but it is impossible to watch Liu’s performance and be unmoved. Tara Lipinski remarked that it seemed like Liu was “playing” on the ice. As she skated off the ice Liu exclaimed into the camera, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” For her, this was something beyond narrative.

Liu did not win by an overwhelming margin. She could have “lost,” despite having performed to her maximum capacity. It’s a shame that the narrative would’ve tainted that moment.

Being able to exist beyond or outside of narrative is one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed the performance of Norwegian cross country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo who won every race he competed in. His dominance erases narrative so you can only pay attention to the amazing physical feat. The footage of him charging up a hill at over 11mph as he leaves other elite athletes in the dust is as thrilling as Liu’s performance. It reminds me of my enjoyment of the John Wick movies, which also downplays narrative in the surface of delivering a kind of pure experience of choreographed close-combat violence. It doesn’t mean anything, except I’m glad to have experienced it.

My mind is going here because as I wrote last week, the next book I’m hoping to write intends to explore the intersection of experience and expertise and how these things translate to meaningful work and lives. Ilia Malinin was undone by the narrative and you hope that his next step is to figure out how to get beyond the narrative as Alysa Liu did. He has exhibited amazing self-awareness on this in the days post competition, so his chances seem good whatever he goes on to do.

One of the chief sources of power in a narrative is the way it sets expectations and anticipation. This is why NBC’s coverage spends so much time on these aspects of the athlete’s stories.

Wikipedia tells me Anne Henning has gone on to a life as a teacher and a mom and grandmother. It sounds like a good life.

I’m not going to flatter myself and say that trying to teach me not to drown is what inspired her to go on to her future profession, but one of the things I tell my students about learning to write is that everything matters and nothing matters simultaneously. There are no stakes that matter more than the attempt at learning something. Failure is inevitable, not fatal and the precursor to trying again. Success can be whatever they decide for themselves.

Most of what we do, most of what we try will ultimately be inconsequential, but we don’t know what that is ahead of time, so your best bet is to be as alert as possible to the moments of meaning, which may not be what you were expecting.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Brian Platzer’s new novel, The Optimists.

At Academic Freedom on the Line I introduced a truly disturbing Q&A between Victor Ray and a Florida International University sociologist about how state officials are now dictating what can be taught in the college classroom.

Derek Krissoff has an interview with Carrie Olivia Adams on the current state of book publicity.

Phil Christman explains why those author scam emails feel so bad. I didn’t have time to email “Reese W.” this week, but regular readers will recall my antidote to the bad feelings these scams engender from a couple weeks ago.

Via my friends McSweeney's “Is it a Red Flag, Wuthering Heights Edition” by Amy Greenlee.”

Recommendations

1. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V E Schwab
2. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne
3. Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman
4. The Heart Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson
5. The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer

Jill G. - Florham Park NJ

Mostly non-fiction of the personal narrative style. In that vein, I’m going with Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many.

How have others found the Olympics this time around? Every four years, like a lot of folks I got into curling. Amazing how dramatic that sport can be.

I took the forthcoming novel from Maria Semple with me on the road and I’m looking forward to getting back on a plane for another trip Tuesday so I can get back into it. I’d be reading it now, but there’s too much to do between now and the trip to immerse myself in the book the way I want, so I’m going to wait until I have that nice multi-hour chunk of unbidden time in the air.

See you next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. For a time, my hometown of Northbrook, IL was considered the “speed skating capital of the world” thanks to a club established by a guy named Ed Rudolph and an outdoor rink/cycling velodrome that allowed athletes to train. Five skaters from Northbrook went to the 1972 Olympics.

2. The same commenter described the Hughes brothers with similar insight: “As for the Hughes brothers: Jack is small, wonderfully skilled, but almost always broken in some way. Quinn is one of the top two defenceman in the world, skates like a figure skater (complimentary) and is ever-followed by the spirit of a deceased Victorian-era child who whispers sad secrets to him.”