“I always try to be a gamechanger or innovator,” says Ilia Malinin, the American prodigy who has cut a swathe through the world of figure skating. In March in Montreal, the 19-year-old roared to his first world championship with a star-making long programme set to music from the TV show Succession. It was immediately hailed as the greatest athletic display in the sport’s history.
Malinin became the second person ever to land six quadruple jumps in a single programme, and the first to do it with a quadruple axel, the heart-stopping four-and-a-half-revolution jump that had never been landed in competition until he came along. Skating with verve and pace to the lumbering strings, dissonant piano chords and swaggering 808s of Nicholas Britell’s crowd-pleasing score, he won the sport’s biggest competition outside the Olympics with a record-shattering free-skate score more than 24 points clear of his closest rival.
The quad axel is figure skating’s most difficult element because skaters face forward as they launch, requiring them to complete an additional half revolution. So dangerous that most skaters won’t even attempt it, the jump has been landed only eight times in competition, all of them by Malinin, who first pulled it off at the US Classic when he was 17. “I can’t really tell if there’s anything specific about genetics or training, but I would say it’s a mix of my parents being former skaters and their knowledge having gone through this whole career process,” Malinin says of his physical and technical achievements. “It’s just all the hard work and all the effort and everything that I’ve put into this sport. All of that in combination is what makes this possible.”
Malinin, who named himself @quadg0d on Instagram years ago in a stroke of uncanny prescience, has rounded off a rapid ascent from winning the world junior title only 23 months ago, installing himself as the hot favourite for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. His emergence has also been a welcome development in a sport beset by controversy, not least the doping case of the Russian teenager Kamila Valieva, which came to overshadow the figure skating competition at the most recent Winter Games.
But having made a career of flouting the impossible, Malinin is far from satisfied. He believes that completing a quintuple jump is only a matter of time and that he’s the one who can do it first. What that means for a sport that critics say is prioritising athleticism over artistry more than ever before is unclear, but that’s someone else’s problem. “What helps me motivate myself is always trying to push the limits,” he says. “I want to make this sport more known and extend it out to different audiences, not just for your skating fans but also sports fans. To make skating big and to show the limits, show how much hard work people put into this sport.”
Born in the northern Virginia suburbs to Russia-born skaters Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, Malinin began skating when he was six at the SkateQuest rink in Reston, where his parents worked as instructors. Keenly aware of the sport’s rigorous demands at the elite level, Tatiana and Roman were cautious about putting their son on the same pathway they had each followed to multiple Olympic appearances representing Uzbekistan. But a healthy taste for competition saw Malinin graduate through the various sectional and regional events dotting the junior circuit.
“They were always at the rink and if I wanted to skate, I’d skate and practise, but if I didn’t then I wouldn’t,” he says. “But after I realised I had more potential, they started to take it more seriously. It was weird for me to have to start putting a little bit more effort into practices. At first I was getting really tired like, why did I want to do this? It’s a hard journey and you just really have to just keep practising and practising.”
A modest regimen of 4.30am wakeup calls for 6am practice three days a week at the Reston facility, an hour’s drive from their Woodbridge home, took shape. His parents’ wealth of knowledge, from technical expertise to lived experience, became an invaluable asset to Malinin’s development. One piece of advice that has helped him the most is “to be confident in yourself, to really trust the muscle memory and the practices and the training that you do”.
He describes the coaching dynamic in those early years as the perfect balance of “supportive” and “pushy, trying to get the best out of me”. There was no clear line between coaching and parenting, which is just how Malinin liked it. “I think that really helps me to feel closer to my parents, to have a really good bond with them. At home they’re always like: ‘This needs to be better’ or: ‘You need to work on that.’ But at the same time, even when I’m at the rink, we can always talk about what I want to eat for dinner or kind of those parent-child conversations.”
Malinin began to take skating more seriously after he unexpectedly qualified for the 2015 US national juvenile championships when he was nine – despite finishing nowhere near the podium. “After that trip I came back home and I noticed big improvements in a lot of my areas: the jumps, the technique and just all of those things,” he says. “And me and my parents both came to a conclusion that there was something interesting about this progression, that maybe we should step it up a little bit, see what happens.”
Malinin won the US national juvenile championship shortly after his 11th birthday. In a free skate performed to John Williams’s theme from JFK, he landed two double axels and four other double jumps, including a double flip-double loop sequence. “That’s when I fully understood my capabilities and what limit I could put on this work,” he says.
What looks in hindsight to have been an express ride to the top hasn’t always been straightforward. After Malinin failed to qualify for the US nationals in 2018, he considered quitting and turning to soccer. “I was frustrated with myself,” he recalls. “Of course my parents were also a little bit upset that I wasn’t making it. I was this close to just saying: ‘It is not going to work out. I just want to stop.’ But after that I took the time to gather myself and be like, OK, it happens. You don’t always have perfect skates or perfect programmes. You just have to regroup and get ready for the next season.”
After controversially missing out on a spot at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing despite a second-place finish at the US nationals (he was named as an alternate), Malinin made an immediate splash throughout his first season on the senior circuit. But he raised the bar even further last season, successfully defending his titles at Skate America and US nationals and winning the Grand Prix final for the first time.
As the world championships drew near, however, trouble brewed behind the scenes. The Succession programme, choreographed by the Canadian ice dancer Shae-Lynn Bourne, a world champion herself in 2003, wasn’t quite clicking. He considered withdrawing from the competition after suffering an injury that kept him off the ice for a week.
Although he skated cleanly in the short programme, Malinin’s omission of the quad axel left him in third entering the free skate behind Japanese rivals Shoma Uno and Yuma Kagiyama. Knowing he needed something special to overtake the leaders, Malinin pulled out all the stops and made the unthinkable look elementary, showing the effortless power, form and fearlessness that have become his calling cards. He drew audible gasps from the Centre Bell crowd as he peeled off his incredible run of jumps to finish with a free-skate score of 227.79, overtaking fellow American Nathan Chen’s all-time record by nearly three points. Remarkably, all six of Malinin’s quads earned positive grades of execution.
One thing is certain – as long as Malinin keeps packing his programmes with point-gobbling elements that his rivals can’t match, he will become increasingly hard to overtake. Seated beside Malinin at a news conference after coming in second in Montreal, Kagiyama offered an extraordinary confession to a gallery of more than 100 international reporters: “If we both perform at our 100% ability, I don’t think that I will be able to win.”
Malinin’s competitive goals are straightforward enough. A successful defence of his world title next year in Boston. Winning gold in Italy. But it’s when the conversation turns to his greater objectives, such as pushing the technical boundaries of figure skating, that Malinin’s eyes light up. That includes the potential addition of a quintuple jump at a time when the rest of the world has yet to catch up to his quad axel.
“If you think about figure skating, 20 or 30 years ago people would say the triple axel wouldn’t be possible,” Malinin says. “But now that people are starting to do four rotations in the air really easily, and now me being the first one to do four and a half, it really only feels like a boundary at the moment. I really think I can land a quint or even more than that.”
Malinin is also eager to take on an even greater challenge: helping to restore figure skating’s popularity in the US, which has declined precipitously since the 1990s when Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Michelle Kwan and Kristi Yamaguchi were household names and Stars on Ice touring shows packed arenas nationwide. It won’t be easy. Malinin says the biggest obstacles include the timing of events, which often take place overnight in US time zones. An even more obvious barrier for the casual fan is the complicated scoring system. Having replaced the old 6.0 system in 2004, the more complex ISU judging system involves a three-person technical panel and a nine-person judging panel, plus various programme component factors.
“For mainstream sports like basketball or even hockey, it’s easy for people to understand what’s going on in terms of how points are made,” Malinin says. “But even I’m not 100% sure how the scoring works [in figure skating] sometimes, and I’ve skated for almost 12, 13 years now.”
Malinin, who is enrolled in classes at George Mason University outside Washington DC, has strived to keep a normal life despite his extraordinary pastime. He deliberately stayed away from switching to the fully online schooling preferred by many young world-class athletes in favour of the local public high school in Falls Church, Virginia. “I definitely wanted to have those social interactions and hang out with people that are not just my skating friends,” he says. “I like to play video games. I like to skateboard, I like to bike, I like to draw, I like to paint. There’s so many different things that I like to do, and I always try to learn something in everything.”
He says he’s keen to study architecture and interior design. “But of course, things could change. I could change my major or have a different view, maybe get into computer technology or even creating video games.”
But until then the quad god has unfinished business. “Of course I definitely do have those goals of going to the Olympics, trying to place at the Olympics or winning a few more world championships,” he says. “But the main goal I always try to stick to when I’m competing is to really try my best to have a consistent and a clean skate.”
