MILAN — The legends assemble. Olympic champions, world champions — the icons of U.S. figure skating — sit together for major competitions and watch the current generation of skaters carry the sport to new heights. Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan, Scott Hamilton, Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano to name a few, and they, just like the thousands of fans who haven’t competed under the championship spotlight, get nervous too.
That is, until Ilia Malinin skates.
“What he’s doing is just legendary,” said Boitano, the 1988 Olympic champion. “It will change the generation and the curve and the history and the future of our sport.”
Malinin is the only person to land a quadruple axel in international competition. He first did it when he was 17; he’s now 21. He was the first person to land seven quadruple jumps in one program. So far ahead of his competition, Malinin could fall multiple times and still win individual gold at the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games.
But simply winning is not enough for this prodigy.
He wants to reset figure skating, getting viewers to come for his historic quad axel and then getting them to stay for his fearless performance quality.
“All of us skaters, we always have a reason to skate,” Malinin said, “And my reason is, I love to perform. I like to push myself to the limits and just see where I can take the sport.”
Malinin hasn’t lost a competition since November 2023. If he finishes this seemingly predestined mission of winning individual gold (the men’s competition begins Tuesday with the short program), it will be the first time the United States has won back-to-back men’s Olympic titles since 1984 (Hamilton) and ’88 (Boitano).
Boitano has followed the search for the next great American men’s figure skater for decades. Often, even the most promising young prospects disappear. Sometimes they go through growth spurts. Sometimes the gap between simply learning skills and performing them is too large to bridge. Then there’s the pressure to become a champion.
When Michael Weiss, a two-time Olympian and two-time world bronze medalist, first told Boitano about a talented skater in Virginia who wanted to learn to do a backflip on the ice, Boitano made a note to pay attention to the kid, who hadn’t started doing quad jumps regularly yet.
Boitano watched with interest as Malinin slowly ascended. Observing to see whether Malinin’s skating and consistency would change as he grew, Boitano knew the self-proclaimed “Quad God” was real once Malinin was putting multiple quads in his programs past his teenage years.
Malinin was 17 when Boitano’s figure skater group chat pinged with a video of the world’s first quad axel. At almost 5 feet 9, Malinin is now the tallest of the U.S. men’s singles skaters in Milan. But he has stayed slight and strong. With impeccable technique learned from his parents Roman Skorniakov and Tatiana Malinina — both former Olympic figure skaters — Malinin has all the physical building blocks to redefine his sport.
“It’s an absolute perfect storm to be able to do what Ilia does,” two-time Olympian and NBC Sports analyst Johnny Weir said.
The axel jump is the only one in figure skating that begins with a forward takeoff. Because skaters land backward, every axel requires an extra half-rotation more than its name suggests, making it turn-for-turn the hardest jump on ice. Other skaters dabbled with the quad axel before Malinin’s mastery. Nathan Chen, Malinin’s quad royalty predecessor who landed five quad jumps to win the 2022 Olympics, was training in the quad axel ahead of the Beijing Games. Yuzuru Hanyu, who won Olympic gold medals in 2014 and 2018, attempted the jump in Beijing but fell.
Simply attempting quad jumps gives skaters a scoring advantage because its base value is so high. It creates a larger margin for error if a skater doesn’t execute the skills perfectly. Even without his quad axel and using just three quad jumps in his free program at the U.S. championships in January, Malinin had a base value for his technical elements that was more than 14 points higher than the second-place finisher.
But the jumps were not the sole reason for his 57-point victory at the national championships. His component score, which judges a skater’s composition, presentation and skating skills each up to 10 points, also was higher than every other competitor.
“Even though he’s ‘the Quad God,’ I don’t think he wants to be only known as that,” said Shae-Lynn Bourne, a three-time Olympic ice dancer who has choreographed for some of the sport’s most respected champions and performers including Hanyu, Chen and Russia’s Evgenia Medvedeva. “I think he wants to give people a show, and I think he wants them to feel.”
This is the fourth season Malinin and Bourne have worked together. The stakes of an Olympic season are different, though, she said. No one wants to make a mistake. They want the audience and judges to like the program. But Malinin, who used to be nervous about choosing music for himself at the risk of not being liked, Weir recalled, leaned into two of his most personal programs.
“We did it from, what do you feel in your soul?” Bourne said. “What do you feel in your voice? What do you need to say? And how do you want to be remembered?”
Skating through a short program about a warrior and his self-narrated free program that portrays his personal struggles to progress in the sport, Malinin doesn’t tell stories with only his famous jumps. He has what Weir called a “wild, effortless quality” to his skating. It’s not a refined, rehearsed style that typically has been held up as the artistic ideal in the sport.
It’s why fellow skaters have fallen under his spell.
“I feel like I’m, like, Ilia-pilled,” said Adam Rippon, a 2018 Olympian. “I’m totally bought in too, because he loves what he’s doing so much. … He’s so unafraid, and I think that’s what really makes him so amazing. We can tell people, ‘Oh, this is the hardest thing ever,’ and it’s like, ‘OK, cool.’ But the reason I fell in love with skating, and I think the reason so many people have fallen in love with skating, is the performances. And one thing that Ilia will absolutely do, aside from everything he’ll do that’s amazing and incredible and groundbreaking technically, he’s going to put on an amazing performance.”
Malinin embraced his role as an ambassador for the sport. While Chen bristled when he was given the “Quad King” nickname, Malinin leans into his alter ego. He has custom merch printed. “Quadg0d” is part of his Instagram handle, where he has 363,000 followers amid a growing audience.
Malinin doesn’t plan to give up the crown anytime soon. He said he wants to compete for at least three Olympic cycles. It’ll give him plenty of time to conquer another frontier for the sport: five rotations.
The “quint” easily could become a reality for Malinin, coach Rafael Arutyunyan said. The renowned jumps expert who worked with Chen and other stars including Rippon, Kwan and Mao Asada has assisted Malinin’s parents with in-person and remote coaching since 2021. When Malinin’s father even questioned whether his son could pull off the quad axel, he worked with Arutyunyan to achieve it in only a few months.
Approaching 50 years of coaching, Arutyunyan will keep putting his faith in the “Quad God.”
“There is always a ceiling,” Arutyunyan said. “But you can break a ceiling.”
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