Last week, the best figure skater in the world fell – twice – and finished eighth.
If you haven’t been following the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics, here’s what happened. Ilia Malinin, nicknamed the “Quad God,” is the only skater on earth who can land a quadruple axel in competition. He hasn’t lost a major event since 2023. He entered the men’s free skate in first place with a five-point lead. He was, by every measure, the gold medal. Not the favorite for gold. The gold.
And then the music started.
He fell twice. He bailed on jump after jump, downgrading quads he’s landed countless times into singles and doubles. He lost 72 points and tumbled from first place to eighth. He put his face in his hands, and afterward, in a moment of raw honesty, said, “I blew it. There’s no way that just happened. I was preparing the whole season. I felt so confident … and then to just go out and have that happen … there’s no words, honestly.”
Sound familiar?
Because that’s every kid who studied hard, knew the material, and then froze on test day.
That’s every student who raised their hand confidently in class all week and then stared at the page on Friday’s quiz.
That’s the child who can read fluently at home, in the car, at the library, everywhere except the reading assessment table with the clipboard and the timer. Or worse, he high-stakes state assessment where the score follows them for years.
The Problem with One-Moment Measurement
Malinin didn’t become less talented on February 13, 2026. He didn’t forget four years of training. He didn’t suddenly lose his ability to land jumps that no other human being on earth can execute.
What happened was simpler yet more complicated than that. The pressure of the moment overwhelmed his nervous system. He said it himself, “All of this pressure, all of the media, and just being the Olympic gold hopeful was a lot. It was too much to handle.”
He wasn’t unprepared; he was overwhelmed. Those are not the same thing.
And this is exactly what high-stakes testing does to our students, especially those who have experienced trauma.
What Trauma Has to Do with It
When the nervous system perceives threat, whether that threat is a quad axel at the Olympics or a standardized test in a classroom, the brain’s survival systems kick in. Cortisol floods the body. The prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for higher-order thinking and problem-solving, goes offline.
For students who have experienced trauma, this response is even more sensitized. Their nervous systems have been trained, often through years of unpredictable, unsafe experiences, to scan constantly for threat and respond fast. A timed test. A quiet room. A stranger administering the assessment. A question they don’t recognize. Any of these can trigger a stress response that has nothing to do with what the child knows and everything to do with what their body has learned about the world.
A single score on a single day tells you what a child could access under those conditions, at that moment, in that environment. It does not tell you what that child knows.
Malinin’s eighth-place finish didn’t tell us he’s the eighth-best figure skater in the world. The ice told us what happened that night. His career tells us who he is.
The Deeper Question
After his skate, reporters asked Malinin what went wrong. His answer was honest and instructive, “I just felt like I had no control.”
No control.
That phrase should land hard for educators, because loss of control, or more precisely, the perception that one has no control over outcomes, is one of the defining experiences of trauma. Children who have lived through abuse, neglect, instability, or loss often feel powerless. School can either reinforce that feeling or begin to heal it.
When we design learning environments where a student’s worth, their grade, their placement, and their future, hinges on a single performance on a single day, we are recreating the conditions that are most difficult for traumatized learners to navigate. We are, unintentionally, building systems that look a lot like the Olympic free skate, where everything is on the line, the pressure is maximum, and one stumble changes everything.
What Trauma-Responsive Assessment Looks Like Instead
I want to be careful here, because I’m not arguing against assessment. Assessment matters. We need to know what students know. The question is how we gather that information in ways that accurately reflect what children understand.
Trauma-responsive assessment isn’t softer. It’s smarter. It looks like collecting evidence of learning across multiple moments and contexts, not just one. It looks like offering choice in how students demonstrate understanding. It looks like building the kind of predictable, safe environment where a child’s nervous system can settle enough to access what they know.
It looks like asking if the assessment measures what the student knows, or does it measure how the student performs under pressure? Because those are two completely different questions.
Malinin’s coaches know who he is. They’ve watched him land the quad axel hundreds of times. One Olympic free skate doesn’t change their assessment of his ability. They are already talking about 2030.
What if we held that same understanding about our students?
The Truth About the “Best” Measurement
Here is what I keep coming back to. The skating world is already having this conversation. Commentators and coaches are noting that the Olympic format, with its single high-stakes performance, doesn’t always crown the most technically gifted skater. It crowns the skater who performs best under that specific kind of pressure, on that specific day.
We’ve built an entire education system on the same premise, and we’ve accepted it as neutral, as objective, as fair. However, for students whose lives have taught them that the world is unpredictable and threatening, the conditions of high-stakes testing are not neutral. They are actively working against the student’s ability to show what they know.
Ilia Malinin will skate again. He will land the quad axel again. He will almost certainly be back at the 2030 Olympics, and the skating world will not define him by one night in Milan.
Our students deserve the same grace.
Want to learn more about creating assessment environments that work for all learners? My book, From Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: 10 Simple Strategies to Reduce Disruptions and Create Trauma-Responsive Classrooms, co-authored with Dr. Jill M. Davis, is available now.
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