7,124 likesMedalist Season 2 Episode 17: How Inori Actually Won Gold — Japan Breaks It Down
Medalist's Season 2 episode 17, "The Upset" (下剋上), aired in Japan and dropped on the official channel — the routine where Inori, a near-unknown with barely a year of figure skating behind her, steals gold at the Novice A finals. The episode's emotional gut-punch landed instantly, but the most-liked Japanese reactions did something English recaps rarely do: they broke down EXACTLY how she won. The recurring theme wasn't "she landed a harder jump" — it was Coach Tsukasa's strategy. Fans walked everyone through it: Inori doesn't have the high-difficulty jumps, so the plan was to max out her program-component score with flawless skating and stack points with a back-loaded combination, the now-famous 2A + Euler + 3S — where the single-rotation Euler exists only to switch her landing foot and unlock a third jump. Then someone clocked the real-world parallel: at the Milano-Cortina Olympics, men's champion Shaidrov won gold with 3A + Euler + 4S the very same week this episode aired, and the thread decided the universe was being poetic. From there it splits into manga evangelists insisting the chapter hits even harder on the page, ENGI getting overdue praise for the skating animation, and a quiet appreciation for the Yonezu song — before someone lands the kind of one-liner only a Medalist fan would.