Quad god: Ilia Malinin sparkles on ice and takes figure skating to next level

Ilia Malinin’s star-making, record-shattering free skate to win the men’s singles at last week’s world figure skating championships in Montreal has registered shockwaves through the sport and beyond.

The flaxen-haired American teenager delivered a mesmerising performance set to music from the TV show Succession that was immediately hailed as the greatest athletic display in the history of figure skating. Performing last in the field of 24 competitors, Malinin became the second person ever to land six quadruple jumps in a single programme and the first to do it with a quad axel, the heart-stopping four-and-a-half-revolution jump that has proven beyond the reach of the sport’s most ambitious talents.

Propelled by Nicholas Britell’s moody eight-chord motif from Succession, the lithe 19-year-old made the unthinkable look elementary as he coolly launched one point-gobbling quad after another in a monochrome, tuxedo-inspired costume, showing the effortless power, form and fearlessness that have become his calling cards in a mere two seasons at the senior level.

While Saturday’s network broadcast on NBC drew a modest 1.56m US television viewers up against March Madness, it has gone viral in the days since, hoovering up millions of views across social media platforms with glowing write-ups everywhere from the New York Times and Good Morning America to the music blog Stereogum and the celebrity news site Just Jared. “I am so honoured that Ilia skated to selections from my music,” Britell told the Guardian. “It is really exciting to see the score transcend beyond the TV screen.”

The quadruple axel is figure skating’s most difficult element because skaters face forward while entering the jump, requiring them to complete an additional half-revolution. It has been landed only eight times in competition, all of them by Malinin, since he first pulled it off at the US Classic two years ago when he was 17.

The largest crowd of the week at Centre Bell looked on as Malinin attacked the back half of the programme, drawing audible gasps with a quad lutz-single euler-triple Salchow combination followed by a quad toe-triple toe and triple lutz-triple axel sequence. By the time he drilled his final jumping pass with about a half-minute to go and the outcome beyond all doubt, the entire building was on its feet and clapping in time beneath a deafening roar. After closing with his signature raspberry twist, Malinin crumpled to the ice in disbelief and covered his face with his hands, overwhelmed by emotion.

“I’m still in shock. I still can’t believe I did this,” said Malinin, who has won the past two US national championships and took bronze at last year’s worlds. “When I got into the starting position, I knew this could be the best skate of my life or it could go terribly wrong. So I just thought: ‘Keep myself under control and try to attack everything.’”

View image in fullscreen

Malinin’s sensational performance, choreographed by the Canadian ice dancer Shae-Lynn Bourne, a world champion herself in 2003, almost never came to pass. He admitted that he had considered withdrawing from the season-ending competition in recent weeks, citing persistent problems with his skate boots and injuries that he repeatedly declined to elaborate on in the run-up. Although he skated cleanly and landed a pair of quadruple jumps in Thursday’s short programme, Malinin’s omission of the quad axel cost him on the components side of the scoring and left him in third entering the free skate behind his Japanese rivals Shoma Uno and Yuma Kagiyama, both of whom matched the American’s two quads on the day.

But having dialled back on his quads for most of the season and knowing he needed something special to overtake the leaders, Malinin pulled out all the stops on Saturday and made a mockery of the sport’s outer technical limits. Skating with verve and pace to the lumbering strings, dissonant piano chords and swaggering 808s of Britell’s crowd-pleasing earworm, he peeled off a quad axel, quad lutz, quad loop, quad Salchow, another quad lutz in combination with a triple flip, a quad toe loop in combo with a triple toe, then added the triple lutz-triple axel combo to finish with a free-skate score of 227.79, overhauling his fellow American Nathan Chen’s all-time record by nearly three points.

All six of Malinin’s quads earned positive grades of execution. Anyone watching at home would have been forgiven for thinking it was a pre-taped special cobbled from the best bits of multiple performances. The jolt of seeing it in person compared to the winning programmes of even a few years ago was roughly the equivalent of watching an Imax screening of Mad Max: Fury Road after streaming Bullitt in your bedroom. This was figure skating’s inherent marriage of athleticism and artistry catapulted to stupefying new heights.

“It means so much to me,” said Malinin, whose self-coined Instagram handle (@quadg0d) from years ago has proven uncannily prescient. “The last few weeks were such a mental and physical challenge to go through. I was even debating whether I should come here or not. It was the last minute, but I wanted to come here to see what I can put out on the ice. I am so glad to be here on top right now.”

View image in fullscreen

Born in the northern Virginia suburbs to the Russia-born Uzbekistani skaters Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, Malinin has rounded off a rapid ascent to the top of the sport from winning the world junior title only 23 months ago, installing himself as a (very) early favourite at the 2026 Winter Games in Italy. Kagiyama, the 2022 Olympic silver medalist, offered an extraordinary confession seated beside Malinin in Saturday’s aftermath, telling a gallery of more than a hundred international reporters through a translator: “If we both perform at 100% of our ability, I don’t think that I will be able to win.”

The fresh-faced American’s meteoric rise is a welcome development in a sport beset by controversy in recent years. The doping case of the Russian teenager Kamila Valieva came to overshadow the figure skating competition at the most recent Winter Games, if not the entire Olympics themselves. When the International Skating Union finally awarded medals in January for the team competition nearly two years after it took place, a creative stroke of Hollywood accounting left Russia on the podium and Canada in fourth.

All sports need stars. And the curiously sparse crowds over the first three days in Montreal, as it played host to figure skating’s biggest competition outside the Olympics for the first time since 1932, spoke to a transitional period. The absence of the Russian contingent, still banned from international events amid their country’s war in Ukraine, appended a quiet asterisk to the women’s competition that was reflected in the underwhelming turnout.

Until last Saturday night, when in the span of four and a half exhilarating minutes Malinin set fire to an otherwise muted worlds and figure skating at large, raising the bar for all comers when the next season kicks off in October.