Years before Ilia Malinin, the world’s most dominant figure skater, felt the smothering G-forces of being a gold medal favorite at the Winter Olympics, he would turn up the music at his rink in Northern Virginia and improvise.
As if in a trance, he would vibe to the melody and flip, twist and jump, moving his body in ways the sport had never seen. There, alone on the ice, he would try to envision what it would be like to entertain a roaring crowd.
Now Malinin, a 21-year-old college student from Vienna, Va., is getting that opportunity on his sport’s biggest stage. On Sunday, his selfless effort in his Olympic debut helped the United States win a team gold medal. On Tuesday, he will compete in the men’s individual event.
After initially feeling overwhelmed by the Olympic experience, Malinin has adjusted to the extra tension and scrutiny that come with the event, he said. “I’ve really gotten everything under control now,” he said on Sunday.
Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic champion and longtime skating analyst, said fans who haven’t seen Malinin compete should brace themselves.
“You’re like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’” Hamilton said. “He does these ninja flips and rotational things, things that didn’t exist before. He’s so different than anything we’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s come from 50 years in the future to show us how far the sport has come.”
It has taken Malinin only a few years to modernize the sport with dangerous elements no one else can perform — including the quadruple axel, a jump that involves incredible speed and power because the athlete rotates four and a half times in the air.
But to him, the self-proclaimed “Quad God,” his ascent to the top of figure skating feels like it has taken forever.
Malinin is the son of two Russian-born Olympic figure skaters, Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, but he didn’t spend his childhood inside the refrigeration of a rink. His parents, who competed for Uzbekistan and are now his coaches, wanted him to choose his own path.
He first skated at 6, only because he had begged to try it, but was given the freedom to be a regular kid. He took gymnastics classes and played soccer, tennis and basketball. He shredded on his skateboard. He dribbled his soccer ball around the rink and dabbled in parkour there, bouncing between stationary objects like a human pinball.
Malinin said he was a natural at parkour because, like the Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles, he had an innate sense of his body position in the air.
At 13, he landed his first quadruple jump, prompting him to claim the moniker “Quadg0d” on Instagram. A month after his 17th birthday, he finished second at the 2022 U.S. national championships in Nashville.
But, considered inexperienced, he was left off the U.S. team for the next month’s Olympics in Beijing. He watched the Games from home, thinking and planning.
And then, jump by jump, spin by spin, he began taking over the sport.
Seven months after Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, considered one of the greatest skaters ever, tried but failed to land a quad axel at the Beijing Games, Malinin landed one, at 17. Now it has become a staple of his long program, and he has landed it more than a dozen times in competition, turning him into a rocket-fueled, 5-foot-8 blur of tousled blond hair and sparkles.
Some of Malinin’s moves are acrobatic, straight out of “The Matrix,” including one called the Raspberry Twist that makes his body look as if it is spinning inside a tornado. (His last name, in Russian, is a variation of the word raspberry.)
“Honestly, he’s doing tricks that we used to laugh about,” Evan Lysacek, the 2010 Olympic champion, said. Back then, Lysacek thought: “Oh, no one will ever do it.”
One problem with some of Malinin’s innovations, said Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist, is that he makes moves once thought impossible “look too easy.”
“I’m worried that the American public isn’t going to understand how hard the quad axel is because when Ilia does it, it looks like a triple axel, you know what I mean?” Boitano said. “Even I can’t tell if it’s a quad and have to ask skaters sitting next to me.”
Starting in 2023, Malinin has won four national championships and two world titles, breaking his own scoring records again and again. In December, he became the first person to land seven quads in one program.
To explain just how good Malinin is compared with other skaters, Hamilton made an analogy using the N.F.L. Malinin won Skate Canada, an international competition last November, by 76.6 points — the equivalent of 10 touchdowns, Hamilton said.
In the Olympic team event in Milan, the margin was unexpectedly slim, but Malinin still mesmerized the audience. He landed only the second official backflip in Olympic figure skating history, and the first one in 50 years.
When he did so, the crowd let out a cheer that threatened to shatter windows.
Malinin believes that he can bring figure skating into the American mainstream, on par with pro sports like basketball, and to do that he is trying to be the face of it. Before the Olympics, he was featured in magazines like Vanity Fair, clad in Dior and pictured on Coca-Cola vending machines. He is in ads for Honda and Samsung. He wants to make skating cool, so the public knows athletes’ names and children swarm rinks to learn the sport.
“I really want to bring it back to its prime glory days,” said Malinin, who wears a custom-made jacket with “4A” emblazoned on the back and “Quad God” on the front.
But arriving in Milan, all those expectations may have gotten the better of him. He acknowledged before the team event that the Olympics was unlike any other event in which he had competed.
“It’s a lot to handle, the pressure, all the attention, all the focus on you to become the Olympic gold hopeful,” he told reporters. “A lot of the times I’ll have bad days where I think about that, and it really shuts me down, and it really puts me in, you know, not the best moods.”
Back home, he could disappear from view and find ways to unwind, like building Lego racecars and playing Minecraft. As a gift for winning the world championship last year, his parents got him two kittens that he said “just make my whole life better.”
Now he must find other ways to navigate the most important competition of his life. The team event brought him his first Olympic gold medal, and his goal now is to win an individual one, to take another step toward his overarching goal, the one that filled his mind during those solo, freestyle skating sessions back home in Virginia.
“I want to revolutionize the sport,” he said.
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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