Two months ago, after easily winning his third straight U.S. Figure Skating national title, Ilia Malinin showed up at his rink to train for the world championships, yet could not bring himself to skate for even a second.
Malinin, the overwhelming gold medal favorite for next year’s Olympics in Italy, had laced up his skates, looked around, and felt an emptiness that stopped him.
That week, 28 people involved in skating had died when an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River, killing all 67 passengers. Among them were young skaters, including three from the Washington Figure Skating Club, Malinin’s club, and others who at times would use the rink in Reston, Va., where he trains.
A coach, a skater and his father, and a whole family — two young sisters and their parents — from that club died, and Malinin, who is 20, was so brokenhearted in the weeks afterward that he could not even bear to say their names, he said.
“Skating usually helps me handle hard things going on in my life, but it was just too emotional to be there,” Malinin said in an interview with The New York Times the first week of March. “I tried to have a productive day of skating. But I just couldn’t take my mind to another place. I just couldn’t.”
When he returned to the rink several days later, he said, he redoubled his efforts to be the best men’s singles skater in the world, one bound for stardom at the Olympics nearly 10 months from now.
He said he focused on fine-tuning his programs and immersed himself in them, determined to dedicate his performances at the World Figure Skating Championships this week to the people who died. His performances should be worthy of their memory, he said.
The result was most likely Malinin’s best performance ever, one by a dynamic skater who is single-handedly lifting the sport into another stratosphere with his technical skills and his ability to connect with a new, younger audience.
As a teenager, Malinin — a hoodie and jeans kind of guy — started calling himself “Quad God” for his ability to execute quadruple jumps, the hardest in skating. But now his unique performances are just as memorable: With his flowing movements and unique body shapes, his routines could double as modern dances. The music he often chooses for them is the opposite of the long-used classical pieces the sport has been known for. He performs to music he likes to listen to, he said.
On Thursday, in his short program at the world championships in Boston, that music was the song “Running” by the rapper NF. He sang along to it as if he were alone in his car, and the crowd could feel the emotion as he moved masterfully, in synchronicity with the song’s every note.
His thick, tousled blond hair became a golden blur as he shunned gravity and went airborne to perform jump after jump, including two quads. The design of his long-sleeved outfit, indigo patterned with thick gray diagonal stripes, made it look as if the top fabric had been torn away to reveal another color. From afar, it appeared ripped at one shoulder — the clothes of someone who has survived a fight.
Along with the conventional jumps, Malinin included a move he calls the Raspberry Twist, which is a twisting version of a butterfly jump during which he is nearly parallel to the ice. He christened the move for his last name: In Russian, “malina” means raspberry. When he landed it in the middle of his step sequence, after all of his jumps had been done, the crowd erupted in a loud, sustained roar, long before his program ended, surprising him.
“Once the music started playing and I got into my starting position, I almost fell into the, you know, flow state, and it really just took me from there,” Malinin said after logging 110.41 points, one of the highest short program scores ever at an international competition, and beating Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama by 3.32 points.
Now Malinin, from Vienna, Va., is the overwhelming favorite to win Saturday’s free skate and his second consecutive world championship. Kagiyama, the Olympic silver medalist at the 2022 Beijing Games, said he is in awe of Malinin’s transformation from a skater largely known for the strength, speed and timing required to land impeccable quads to one with artistry nearly as untouchable.
“I’m starting to think he’s invincible,” Kagiyama said.
Adam Rippon, a bronze medalist at the 2018 Olympics, said that Malinin’s athleticism, especially his quad jumps, tends to overshadow his natural talent as a performer, and that’s a shame.
“It’s really hard to be unafraid and expose your emotions like that, but I think he does that really well, and he does that unabashedly, almost to the point where he’s reckless,” Rippon said. “I think the quads are amazing, but what I really like about his skating is that he pushes himself to the absolute ends in his brilliant, brilliant programs.”
Spectators can expect more of that brilliance during Malinin’s free skate on Saturday. A bonus is that he might try to perform seven quads — a record, if he lands them — if he’s feeling good in warm-ups, he said. And maybe even a backflip. His song will be “I’m Not a Vampire (Revamped)” by the rock band Falling in Reverse.
On paper, he has already won. Like Simone Biles in gymnastics, the base scores of his technical elements are so high that it would be hard for anyone to surpass him.
Malinin showed that at nationals in January, when he won by nearly 47 points, a colossal win in a sport in which margins of victory are often measured in single digits, or even tenths. He landed six quads, which each require a mind-boggling four-and-a-half revolutions. No other skaters have landed as many in one program.
For years, the top skaters in the world could only dream of landing a quad axel, a jump made harder by its forward-facing entry. Malinin, now a student at George Mason University, landed it at an international event when he was 17.
“At his age and especially at his level of purity of technique and everything else he brings, not only do I think no one can beat him, but I don’t think that there’s a way to understand what his ceiling is,” Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist and television skating analyst, said.
“What more could Ilia do?” Hamilton added. “Anything he wants. Nothing is impossible for a skater with that kind of natural talent.”
Malinin said his practices before worlds were easy. The jumps. The spins. The movements to the music. It all felt so right, he said.
Yet at the rink, there were times when he thought about the skaters who died, he admitted, forcing him to pause. His parents — Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skornyakov, who skated for Uzbekistan at past Olympics — coach him and helped him regroup, he said.
Those skaters he knew were not there anymore, gliding by or standing back, wide-eyed, to watch him and learn from him, or to train next to him, and that “really upsets me,” Malinin said. Honoring them through his performances has helped him move forward.
“I’m also really glad that I was able to get through this,” he said, “and really just have this mind-set of, you know, skating for them now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/us/malinin-world-figure-skating-championships.html
