Why American “quad god” Ilia Malinin skates like no one else |
Ilia Malinin, 21, is the heavy favorite to win the gold medal for the United States at the Milan Cortina Olympics. | Tim Clayton/Getty Images
Figure skating is nothing without tension. Humans speed across slick ice, balancing on a thin metal blade and making sharp turns. The athletes defy physics, jumping and twisting their bodies in the air, seemingly faster than you can blink. Millimeters can mean the difference between success and splat, risk goes hand in hand with reward, and winning or losing can come down to decimal points.
The paradox of watching American Ilia Malinin skate is that he’s so good, there often isn’t any suspense. He lands the most difficult jumps. He breaks scoring records left and right. And when he skates his best, the only real question is who is getting second place.
The 21-year-old “quad god” has become a staggering, intimidating constant.
Malinin’s astonishing jumping ability and his vaunted quadruple axel make him the heavy favorite to take home gold at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. Malinin is already changing the way we think about figure skating in the US and what is believed to be possible within the sport. If he wins, it would be a historic achievement.
And the one staggering thing to keep in mind watching Ilia Malinin in these Olympics? He could get even better.
Why the quad axel makes Ilia Malinin the favorite for figure skating gold
Whether you’re a fan of figure skating or not, you are probably aware of the sport’s most famous jump: the triple axel, a three-and-a-half revolution trick that has immortalized and haunted so many routines in Olympic history.
Canadian Vern Taylor became the first person to land it in international competition in 1978, and many attempted and then perfected the jump in the decades that followed. The axel is considered the most difficult of all the jumps across skating’s four levels, mainly because of its extra half revolution and its forward-facing takeoff. (Skaters launch themselves back-first in all the other jumps, which is considered easier, and why a triple lutz is less difficult and thus worth fewer points than a triple axel.)
As time went on, skaters began adding more and more turns to the sport’s other five jumps — flip, loop, lutz, toe loop, salchow — but adding an additional revolution to the axel seemed too difficult.
Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, arguably the greatest figure skater of all time, attempted a quad axel at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, but did not land it. Perhaps the human body simply wasn’t made to jump that high, spin that fast, absorb that much torque, all while carving through ice.
Forty-four years later after Taylor’s first triple axel and months after Hanyu’s Olympic try at a quad, Ilia Malinin did the impossible.
Malinin, then 17, landed the first quadruple axel in history — the International Skating Union only counts jumps if they’re landed in a competition — about 22 seconds into his long program at Skate America in Norwood, Massachusetts. Malinin has only lost........