Barb Caffrey's Blog

The tough moments are the ones that often define us. Figure skater Ilia Malinin, United States men’s champion (multiple years), is finding that out today.

There has only rarely been a bigger favorite to win a gold medal than this year’s hopeful, Malinin. He’d not lost a competition in a few years, he’s only twenty-one, he has an arsenal of seven quadruple jumps (including the quad Axel, a jump only he can do), and he mostly skates cleanly with fine edges, great footwork and competent spins. (I’m kind of with the late Dick Button on spins these days. It’s not Malinin’s fault or any other competitor’s fault as they have to go for multiple positions in each spin to get the best amount of points plus grade of execution and such, but a straight line and tight rotation in a spin are a lot easier to see if you’re doing the same spin for twenty seconds rather than five or six different positions in that same amount of seconds.)

Here’s the thing, though. Everyone has off nights. You can be sick, you can be worn to flinders with nerves, you can feel great walking out there to compete (I know this as a former competitive musician) and then, for whatever reason, nothing works right…and we all know this is possible. We’ve had bad competitions before. Rarely, if we’re exceptionally good — and Malinin is that, without a doubt — but it does happen because we’re human. Human equals fallible, mortal, and capable of both the highest highs and lowest lows (along with everything in between).

When Malinin stepped onto the ice, he looked calm and ready to go. But within a minute, he’d “popped” a jump (meaning his body didn’t let him rotate properly; it’s an involuntary thing), then took a hard fall. He got up and did his best thereafter, but he looked shaky and he knew it. To his credit, he gave it his all (not that I’d expect anything less of the U.S.’s pre-eminent skater), but when the judging panel was done, he’d fallen from first place into eighth place, and way out of medal contention.

This was unexpected, to put it mildly.

Most people, when facing the ashes of their immediate hopes and dreams, are not able to do what Malinin did next, though. After his scores, he immediately congratulated the winner, Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, gave him a hug, talked for a moment…and only then walked away to face the hard questions from the media.

What Malinin did showed grace under pressure. It showed sportsmanship. It showed class.

What I know from past competitions is, the worst day I’ve ever had as a musician is not what defines me. The best day, as wonderful as it was, also does not define me. It’s all the work I’ve put in to get to the point to be in that position that defines me, and being able to go on when your hopes have been dashed and your life has become something you didn’t want it to be is the name of the game.

So, while I’ve battled numerous health issues, I’m still standing. While I am not currently playing in any bands or orchestras, I continue to compose music. While my three novels are still out of print (I really am working on getting them back out there, but so many other things are going on it’s hard to focus), I continue to write. And while my pace slowed a lot last year, I didn’t stop.

I say all this because Malinin is only twenty-one, as I said before. This may be the first really big defeat he’s ever had. He’s shown class, grace, and sportsmanship, which is more important than just about anything in defeat. But now he has to show himself some of that class, grace, and sportsmanship, too.

I hope he has a good sports psychologist or counselor to talk with, too. I know counseling, over time, has helped me greatly.

You see, you can’t always do everything you want with your gifts. Life gets in the way. Health gets in the way. In Malinin’s case, perhaps the condition of the ice got in the way, or the skate blades got in the way (as the team medal podium Malinin and Team USA stood on messed with a lot of their skates, and those are hard to break in; this also affected the other team medal winners), or his nerves got in the way (as he said he thought he had mental errors, also a very good thing to say right off the bat). He didn’t need to say those were the things, if they were, but these are all considerations for him — just as the condition of my reeds, how well the keys were working, whether or not I’d pulled a muscle so standing while soloing was hard, etc. — as they were considerations for me.

All you can do, as a human being as well as a competitor, is to give yourself the best chance to win. After that, it’s up to things beyond our control.

And after that, it’s up to us as to what we do about it. Will we let it fuel us and keep us going, even if it’s not in the way we wanted? Or will we let it bother us so much that we start looking at ourselves as failures?

I hope in Malinin’s case that he can look at it as a learning experience. Then let it go. This one competition, as important as it was, does not define him. And cannot define him.

Only what he does, what he continues to do, and what he has done overall will define him. And the rest of that book has yet to be written.