Failure

Everybody fails. You try something, it doesn't work, life goes on.

But what if you're not supposed to?

I don't expect everyone to have the bountiful free time I've had the last 10-14 days to really settle in with the Winter Olympics. Frankly, it's not healthy to watch as much curling as I have, and I know people who actually play the sport and understand the scoring, two things I'll simply never do.

But I know many more people are aware of Ilia Malinin, aka The Quad God, the U.S. men's figure skater who was hyped to hell and back prior to the Milan Cortina games. He crushed the short program, and the entire world awaited his triumph in the long program, a gold medal all but inevitable. Mandy and I held off on going to a happy hour just to say we saw it live.

Only he wasn't inevitable.

He ate shit.

That actually undersells it.

He ate ALL the shit. Then went back for seconds.

The shock of the moment was remarkable. He pulled up on one of his maneuvers, which caused audible concern from (the legitimately great) announcers Tara Lipinski & Johnny Weir. He quickly followed it up by falling flat on his ass, which caused Mandy to actually gasp and Tara & Johnny to sound like the Hindenburg was landing atop them.

And then he kept bailing out. And then he fell down again.

To put this in Top Gun terms, he was doing fly-bys in the short program and wailing "Talk to me Goose!" in the long program. I fully expected Meg Ryan to come out on the ice and tell him how much Anthony Edwards loved skating with him.

He finished in 8th place.

There is no shame in being the eighth best figure skater in the world. Being the eighth best at anything in the world (ice skating, polka, microwaving nachos) is an incredible accomplishment unless you're Ilia Malinin, who set an otherworldly high bar to clear for himself, as did NBC. He wasn't just supposed to finish in first, he was supposed to break every record.

Once the shock wore off, the questions began. Was he hurt? Was the ice in bad shape? Did the Canadian curlers cheat on this, too?

No. He told reporter Andrea Joyce that the pressure got to him, and he wasn't ready for the moment.

I didn't expect that kind of honesty. Malinin's 21. I was an idiot when I was 21. I would have blamed Italy and the baby Jesus and Newton's very unfair second law of motion. And here he was, owning it and graciously congratulating Mikhail Shaidorov, the unheralded gold medal winner.

My point here, and I swear I have one, is that we all fuck things up, but what matters after you're done fucking things up is how you go about unfucking it. Do you make it worse? Do you lash out? Do you own it? Do you extend grace to yourself or let it eat at you night after sleepless night? Malinin had the worst moment of his entire professional life in front of the world and accepted it with humility.

Four years out, it seems like the kind of thing that will help him win the gold medal in 2030. If he doesn't, that's OK, too. Life's too goddamn short. Don't let failure occupy too much of it.

I'm saying this to myself as much as I am anyone reading this.

Elsewhere

*I wasn't kidding about Tara & Johnny being great. They're without peer at covering the sport they love and explaining a scoring system that is incomprehensible to even the savviest sports knower. There are maybe (maybe!) one or two NFL announcing crews with their level of sophistication. Maybe Tony Romo before Romo just started being a character instead of an analyst.

If you think this is me saying I want them to do a random Saints-Jaguars game next season, you are correct.

*CORRECTION: I misspelled the last name of "Wuthering Heights" director Emerald Fennell in Monday's newsletter. Her film made $35 million in the US over the weekend, I hope that makes up for it.

*Robert Duvall (1931-2026). Just go to his IMDB page and pick a movie. OK, not Days of Thunder. What a dude.

For those who like useless trivia: His first film role was Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird.