Figure skating star Ilia Malinin is changing the sport in ways that go beyond his status as an overwhelming favorite for Olympic gold in Italy.
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.
