Don’t forget who flipped first.
On Tuesday night, figure skater Ilia Malinin thrilled the crowd and judges with a flawless, impossibly challenging short program that included a much-ballyhooed backflip on the ice. The 21-year-old is now in first place and widely favored to win the individual gold when the competition concludes Friday with the men’s long program.
But, despite the attention Malinin is getting for the backflip, he’s not the first Olympian to land it.
That honor goes to France’s Surya Bonaly. She famously did the daring maneuver at the 1998 Nagano Olympics at which point it’d been banned for decades for being too dangerous.
It was a dramatic moment. Bonaly was suffering from an injury and out of medal contention, but wanted to go out with a bang.
The arena erupted in cheers, but the judges responded with deductions.
“I’m not crazy, but I was called untethered and now it’s OK,” Bonaly told The Post in an exclusive interview. “It’s hard to be the pioneer … [but] I guess I would rather be the first than one of the thousands after.”
She performed the maneuver as a defiant statement after feeling that she’d been under-appreciated by the figure skating establishment for years, in part because she was black and her skating was powerful and athletic at a time when the sport wanted women to be dainty and demure.
At the 1992 Olympics, she attempted to land a quadruple jump but judges controversially deemed her toe loop slightly under-rotated, denying her the honor of being the first woman to land a quad in competition.
“It was a challenge of being the best and better than the champion, who was white,” she said in 2022. “I had to better than a normal skater.”
Now 52 and working as a coach at an international school in Minnesota, Bonaly is glad to see the trick in the spotlight — and skating evolving.
“I’m happy,” she said. “Sports is all about moving forward, step by step, [to] push boundaries and push limits, and I did it years ago.
“Thirty years ago, there were less people of color,” she explained. “You had to have real skirts, 30 years ago, you couldn’t have music [with vocals], you had to be instrumental music, so now everything has changed. Thank god.”
The backflip moment was hardly first time that Bonaly found herself in the middle of a scandal.
She notably and narrowly lost the gold medal to Japan’s Yuka Sato at the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships. Bonaly initially refused to take the podium during the awards ceremony, then pulled off her medal in protest of the judges’ decision.
She later told Mickey Duzyj, director and executive producer of the Netflix documentary series “Losers,” that she felt frustrated by the judges who would never recognize her skills and always mark her down.
“It’s almost like I was born a bit too early for the Olympic world scene,” the European skating champ mused. “I would have been right on point 1770843988 for entertaining the crowd and being a true athlete.”
In recent years, figure skating has become more focused on athletics, with moves getting more and more advanced.
In addition to doing the back flip, Malinin is the only skater who has successfully landed a quadruple axel — a jump that required four-and-a-half rotations and once seemed impossible.
Bonaly will likely watch the so-called “Quad God” when he skates on Friday, but she wouldn’t mind if she got a bit of a shout-out if and when he does another backflip.