Photographs by OK McCausland
One of the pleasures of watching Ilia Malinin, apart from his indifference to gravity, is to witness him becoming. Becoming a world champion, as opposed to a juvenile with a skate-park mentality and a face like a Disney prince. Becoming a master of quadruple jumps that no one else can land, rising with all the ease of a young Michael Jordan—before landing on a pair of butcher knives, on ice.
Sometimes there are evolutionary leaps in sport, the arrival of athletes so physically dynamic, they widen the eyes with incredulity: the gymnast Simone Biles thundering in the air, the swimmer Michael Phelps coursing through the water with a wake like an attack boat’s. Malinin is one of these. In December, while refining his routine for his first Olympic Games, in Milan, the 21-year-old figure skater landed seven quadruple jumps in competition, spinning like a weather vane in a windstorm. No other competitor landed more than four.
In a sport in which medals can be determined by fractions of a point, Malinin wins by 30, 40, sometimes even 70 points, and he does so with style, sliding on his knees and cartwheeling on one hand to medleys of classical cello mixed with Gen Z electronic power bass. His signature is a quadruple axel—a jump that only he has ever successfully completed in competition, earning him his self-styled nickname, the “Quad God.” Late in his routines, he likes to toss off one more maneuver, just to commence the crowd-roar: He high-kicks his skates over his head into a backflip, and lands on one foot.
Malinin’s confidence would be insolent if his acrobatics weren’t so astonishing. “I broke physics,” he told me recently, only half-kidding during a conversation in the back hall of a practice rink in Leesburg, Virginia. “Now I think physics doesn’t apply to me.” He stood 5 foot 8 and 140 pounds in shapeless sweats and Nikes, his pale triangle of a face topped by flaxen hair. He did not yet have his own car. He was waiting for his dad to pick him up.
The first quadruple jump of any kind was landed in 1988 by a Canadian champion named Kurt Browning, but it was a one-off. Quads wouldn’t be performed consistently until about 15 years later, after an American named Timothy Goebel became the first man to hit three in a single program, in 1999, and did so again to win a bronze in the 2002 Winter Games, earning the nickname “Quad King.” By the mid-2000s, doing one or more quads was practically a necessity, because they were scored almost twice as high as triples. Quads became part of everyone’s repertoire, with five different varieties and degrees of difficulty: the toe loop (worth up to 9.5 points), salchow (9.7), loop (10.5), flip (11), and lutz (11.5).
But one particular quad jump was so demanding that even the most elite champions could not perform it: the axel, valued at 12.5 points. To the casual viewer, most jumps are indistinguishable from one another, but anyone can detect an axel, because it’s the sole jump that requires the skater to take off facing forward, then execute a blind backward landing, on the opposite foot. The skater actually rotates four and a half times, in less than a second. As of 2021, only one man had even tried a quad axel in competition: The 27-year-old Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan went for it in his country’s national championships that year, but he under-rotated and two-footed his landing.
Malinin landed it smoothly in 2022, when he was 17.
He was a skinny-chested boy who had just begun competing in major international events, and he knew that the entire skating world considered it nearly impossible. The word provokes him. “It just screams ‘I’m possible,’ ” he said, as he walked through the hall of the practice rink and grabbed a snack of Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites.
Malinin has a typical 21-year-old’s crush on profundity; his long program, titled “A Voice,” opens with his own voice narrating a series of pontifical maxims, such as “Begin where light no longer reaches, where no path has yet been made.” If he can sound sophomoric, well, he is a sophomore, enrolled at George Mason University. But a mature, obsessive work ethic turns his big ideas into big jumps and one-of-a-kind routines. “If I find a passion for something, I will really get down to just hammering away at it, until I get it,” he said.
Once Malinin gets it, the next boundary comes into view. One quad axel? Well then, how about two in a row?
To fully appreciate how revolutionary Malinin is, consider some fundamental physics and biomechanics. The gold-medal-determining long program, also known as the “free skate,” lasts for four and a half minutes. Roughly 30 seconds in, Malinin’s heart rate rises to 90 percent of its capacity, about 180 beats a minute, and stays there for the duration. The effort is comparable to that sustained by the world’s fastest milers.
Wearing carbon-composite skates that weigh about two pounds each, Malinin reaches a vertical leap of approximately 30 inches on his quad axel—one kinematic study captured it at 33 inches, similar to the standing vertical leaps of NBA players such as Stephen Curry, Devin Booker, and Kevin Durant. He lands on a blade that is just 3/16 of an inch wide.
Malinin enters the jump skating at about 15 miles an hour. As he snaps into his shoulder turn, he draws his arms and legs inward, creating a spin. At this stage, he experiences at least 180 pounds of centripetal force. By way of comparison, a NASCAR driver rounding a corner will experience about 400 pounds of centripetal force, while wearing a seat belt. As he reaches his apex, Malinin is spinning at 350 revolutions per minute. This is about the same as a kitchen stand mixer or the marine engine of an oil tanker.
A human being turning at such a rate experiences serious disorientation. Somehow, Malinin must find a way of “undizzying” himself, as Goebel told me. Skaters do this by spotting certain visual markers in the rink, but they don’t always succeed in reorienting. Once, after completing one routine, Goebel nearly skated into the Zamboni tunnel by mistake.
As Malinin comes out of his spin, his backward boot strikes the ice with a landing force between five and eight times his body weight, or upwards of 700 pounds. In other sports, athletes distribute shocks to both feet, in soft shoes or on forgiving surfaces. “He’s going to land on one foot,” on a sheet of ice atop concrete, Deborah King, a biomechanics professor at Ithaca College, told me. Adding to the stress on his leg, she said, is the rotational energy he’ll need to stop so he can glide out of his landing.
Still, none of this captures the totality of Malinin’s performances. There are spins, jumps into spins, jumps out of spins, fast steps, crossovers, rapid changes from inside to outside edge. Even a single misstep or break in a leg line will be marked down by the judges. “You know, when you kick a soccer ball, you don’t have to look perfect,” Malinin said. “You don’t have to point your toe.”
Malinin spends up to six hours a day on the ice, in morning and afternoon sessions, rehearsing his footwork and doing as many as 50 jumps, six days a week. “Your whole body dies at the end of the day,” he said.
Malinin was merely on the threshold of public awareness late last year, as the Olympics approached, but seemed ripe for a “holy shit” audience moment. Only in the past few months has he begun to get endorsement deals with big companies—Xfinity, Coca-Cola, Google, Honda. “At first it was like, Who? ” Sheryl Shade, Malinin’s co-agent, told me as she described her initial meetings with potential sponsors, a year and a half ago. But then “he started winning everything. It was like, Oh! You mean the Quad God.”
The Honda deal will finally get Malinin his own wheels and liberate him from the family car. The day I met him in November, he was at the Leesburg rink to film a commercial for the company. That morning, his father had dropped him off with the understanding that he wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks.
But as the camera crew darkened the arena, Malinin was isolated in a spotlight. Unable to resist, he performed a quadruple jump, and then a second one. Then he ordered the camera crew to take up a different angle, blazed across the ice, and arched into a backflip, his skates lightly touching down with a tch sound.
Afterward, he sat with damp hair on a sofa in a back room of the arena. When I asked if what he’d just done felt particularly hard, he shrugged and said no.
Then he glanced up and said, “Don’t tell my dad.”
Malinin is the son of two former Olympic skaters, Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, Russian emigrants who competed for Uzbekistan but came to Virginia in 1998. Skating is a “family tradition, family business, family ritual, whatever you can name it,” Malinin said. Without the coaching and influence of his parents, “I’d be nowhere.”
Malinina and Skorniakov seldom comment on their son or their methods for coaching him, wary of creating any more pressure for him. They declined to be interviewed for this story. Malinina does not attend most of her son’s events, because she gets too anxious. “We have a strong connection, and as soon as I get nervous, he can feel that,” she said in a rare 2024 joint interview with her husband for the International Skating Union. Skorniakov, too, gets nervous—the first time he watched his son perform a double lutz, he said, “I remember I almost passed out.” But he is better at concealing it, with a stoic rink-side presence that his son describes as “chill.”
If figure skating is one of the most demanding sports in the world, then the hardest version of it is Russian. Malinin has never been to Russia, but its traditional skating commandments, heavily influenced by ballet, are stamped on him. His maternal grandfather, Valeri Malinin, coaches at a small rink in Novosibirsk, and during visits to the States, he had an early hand in teaching his grandson. “It is clear that there is only one correct technique”—the Russian one, Valeri told the state-owned news channel Russia 24 in a 2023 interview.
Malinina and Skorniakov were born in Siberia and raised in the old Soviet sports system. Skaters trained as much off the ice as they did on it, and form was everything: Even an incorrect jaw bite could lead to a slight bend in the backbone, affecting a jump. A preeminent coach of that era once made a skater change his bangs, believing that hair below the eyebrows caused a wilting of the spine.
Skorniakov and Malinina, out in distant Ural mining country, could never quite crack the inner circle of the major training center in Moscow. For years there was just one rink in Sverdlovsk, where they trained, and it had to be shared by all, including hockey players. Practice time was precious, and bureaucrats carefully allocated the hours. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Skorniakov and Malinina’s coach, Igor Ksenofontov, became the national coach for Uzbekistan in 1993, and they followed him to Tashkent seeking better resources and opportunities.
At roughly the same time, small enclaves of Russian-émigré skaters began forming in out-of-the-way places in the United States, near excellent local ice rinks. In 1998, Skorniakov and Malinina moved to Dale City, Virginia, for their training. The availability of good ice and the cost of living were a relief.
They found work teaching skating for hourly fees at the Mount Vernon Rec Center to support themselves while they trained. In her few spare hours, Malinina studied English—she read Gone With the Wind. According to her father, she adapted so quickly that when she went back to Novosibirsk to visit him, she looked around his apartment and said, “Oh, Dad, is this how you live?” Valeri shot back, “Well, how do we live? You used to live like this too.”
The move to America seemed to boost their careers. Malinina, renowned for her technically perfect triple lutz, placed eighth in the 1998 Nagano Olympics and fourth at the 1999 World Championships, her career best at 26 years old. Skorniakov finished 19th in the Salt Lake City Games in 2002. They were both known as “very big jumpers,” Goebel recalled. The two married in 2000, and both retired after Salt Lake to become full-time coaches and start a family. When Malinin was born in 2004, they gave him his mother’s last name because it was easier for Americans to pronounce, and they decided he would be anything but a skater. To have even a chance of being elite “takes so much time, dedication, lots of sacrifice, so much hard work,” his mother told the International Skating Union. “And we thought maybe we want him to experience a different life than we did.”
But they worked 12 hours a day, giving lessons from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the SkateQuest ice arena in Reston, Virginia. The baby had to be there too. As Malinin grew into a toddler, he would watch through the rink glass as the other children glided around. When he was about 6, he began pestering his parents. “Can I go on the ice?” he’d ask. “Can I go on the ice?”
They finally decided to teach him to skate—never with the thought that he would compete. But almost immediately, he began making up his own routines, mimicking the older skaters. His parents thought it was cute. It was also portentous. “I definitely do like performing,” Malinin said. “It’s something I realized when I grew up, when I started skating even just for fun. It was part of me.”
Still, his parents doubted that he would be a skater. They enrolled him in gymnastics and soccer. He took violin lessons. On the ice, he loved to jump—his grandfather taught him all the variations during a single three-month visit when he was about 7—but he’d rebel when they tried to work on the details of his posture and arm position. “Hold your back,” Malinina would tell him, and explain that a skater’s performance couldn’t just be about jumps. “I’ll do that later,” he’d say.
When Malinin was 12, his father drove him to the University of Delaware to participate in a project measuring the jumping ability of young skaters, led by Jim Richards, a kinesiology professor. Though his parents had refused to push him, he had shown what he could do with even a little effort: The previous year he had won the 2016 U.S. juvenile boys’ title by landing two double axels, despite practicing just two hours a day. Malinin was fitted with 10 reflective markers from his head to his skates and filmed by 10 cameras that captured his rotations and time in the air in a series of jumps. The data were then fed into a 3-D computer program that created two models, one of Malinin’s jumps and another of conceptual improvements to the jumps.
Some of the young skaters weren’t going to be elite under any circumstances. But Malinin clearly had that potential. “What we found from the measurements is that through pretty simple changes with his arm position, he could land a triple axel without a problem,” Richards told me. He shared something more with Malinin and his father: With a few further adjustments, he would be able to achieve the spin rates he needed for quads.
The possibilities persuaded Malinin to apply himself more seriously. He also became more appreciative of his unique access to two former Olympians. They’d never shown him videos of their own performances or boasted about their medals, but their accounts of how they’d had to scrap for enough ice time to practice impressed him. The family would rise at 4:30 a.m. for an hour-long commute to SkateQuest, where he’d practice with his parents for two hours before school. Skorniakov worked with him on axels using a harness and a pole, bracing and lifting as his son spun in the straps. Malinina was relentlessly precise—and more blunt than Skorniakov—in her assessment of his technique. She taught that it took “just a very small fraction to change everything up, to make it easier, or make things harder,” Malinin said.
Malinin landed his first triple axel at 13. He was practicing at a competition when he felt a surge of confidence and went for it. He landed it easily. “I was like, Okay, I didn’t expect that,” he said. Skorniakov was over at the rail, and his eyes popped in surprise. It was the moment that persuaded Malinin to pursue skating professionally.
They moved to Vienna, Virginia, to be closer to SkateQuest and Malinin’s high school. He went to class until 12:45 p.m. and then spent the rest of the day on the ice, now training for four or five hours. On Sundays, his parents insisted that he do anything but figure skate. He got hooked on skateboarding and the video game Fortnite. On TikTok, he followed Wisdom Kaye, an irreverent fashion influencer who modeled eclectic clothing and staged challenges such as “style every character in the movie Dune.”
Malinin’s side interest in performance art began to show up in his skating. He seeded his programs with unorthodox elements, like the “raspberry twist,” a sideways scissoring move. It wasn’t a traditional jump, or a spin, either. It was just his.
At 16, he created the Instagram handle ilia_quadg0d_malinin. It seemed presumptuous, given that he’d only landed the easiest one, a toe loop, in competition—and only once, at that. But it inspired him to keep working toward a quad repertoire, he told U.S. Figure Skating sometime later. “I can’t be ‘Quad God’ without any quads,” he remembered thinking.
He was aided, oddly enough, by the coronavirus. In 2020, when all of the rinks had shut down for almost four months and he was unable to skate or go to school, his parents had designed an off-ice program imitative of the old Russian physical training, including three hours a day of explosive-jump training, runs, skipping rope, stretching. They asked a nearby homeowners’ association for permission to use a tennis court as their training area. The off-ice work strengthened Malinin so much that when he got back in the rink, jumps felt easier. The final piece of his development came the following year, when he began tutorials with the technical-jumping coach Rafael Arutyunyan. Arutyunyan knew instantly he had a student capable of the quad axel. He tinkered just slightly with Malinin’s entry, and the next month, the boy was landing it.
Starting in 2021, Malinin posted Instagrams of himself doing quad axels in practice. Anticipation began to mount in the skating world. Then Malinin signaled his intention to try one in competition. “I was sort of aghast,” Goebel, the Quad King, said. He noted that the axel is not just technically difficult, but dangerous. “I never thought I would see one in my lifetime.”
Goebel decided to fly out to the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, where Malinin would be making his debut as a senior skater. “I wanted to see Ilia jump in real life,” he said. Could he possibly be that good? Malinin, just 17, landed four quads. “And the effortlessness with which he completed these really, really difficult things, as a teen, was kind of shocking.”
Malinin withheld the quad axel that day because his parents were worried that he would hurt himself. But as the season wound down, they gave him their blessing. On September 14, 2022, at the U.S. International Figure Skating Classic in Lake Placid, New York, on his very first jump, Malinin rose and spun four and a half times, as clean and straight as a flagpole, and lightly touched down, to pure tumult.
He won the World Championships in 2024 and again, easily, in 2025, when the International Skating Union also named his parents coaches of the year. Colleagues continually write or call Malinina and Skorniakov to ask what they did to create such a performer. “There are no secrets,” Valeri Malinin told Russia 24. It’s been a simple matter of the Russian method colliding with American possibility—in the person of a creative young athlete determined to explore the limits of his sport.
The SkateQuest rink in Reston is a giant box with a metal roof that’s meant to hold one thing: ice. It’s a no-frills space with small stands of benches and a room with a window where mothers and fathers may watch from a distance. Here, skaters can fall without anyone but their parents seeing. Which, on this Monday, two days after his Honda shoot and 75 days before the Olympics opening ceremony, Malinin did. A lot.
Malinin took the ice to rehearse the opening combination of his Olympic short program, called “The Lost Crown.” The program (which lasts two minutes and 40 seconds and counts for about a third of a skater’s overall score) began with a leg-burning spread-eagle arc, into a quad axel followed by a triple toe loop. The jump combo would be yet another first, never landed in competition. On his initial try, Malinin was slightly off axis and skidded out of the axel sideways. There was a brief clatter as he went down, gathering frost on his pants.
For the next hour, the scene repeated itself. Music, a jump, and a trip or stumble out. At one point, Malinin slammed his fists on his thighs in frustration. After another skid and lurch, he stamped a skate on the ice so hard that chips flew up, enough to fill a martini glass. His father trailed him on the ice, murmuring. Finally, Malinin managed to hit the combination.
A little over a week later, two days after his 21st birthday, Malinin skated onto the ice for the International Skating Union Grand Prix, in Nagoya, Japan. Just seconds into his short program, he stumbled out of the quad axel–toe loop combination, as he had in practice. The miss left him in a surprising third place. A reporter asked if it would affect his confidence. He replied evenly, “Not really.”
By the time a skater performs a jump in front of judges, “they’ve landed hundreds of them—and missed thousands,” the NBC commentator and former Olympian Johnny Weir told me. Shade, Malinin’s co-agent, said she has seen Malinin hit nine quads in practice, without missing. But landing big jumps in competition, when adrenaline duels with cortisol, is more difficult. And Malinin has compounded this difficulty by continually trying to do the unprecedented.
On the afternoon we spoke, I asked how he felt about the pressure. Malinin straightened and leaned forward on the sofa. “Okay, there’s different ways to word it,” he said. “Pressure is—it’s not a good way. It feels like a negative, and I’m not really good with dealing with pressure. I think it’s more like status. That’s what I call it, which makes me, like, feel more confident.”
Status: That’s what Malinin projected when he returned to the ice during the Grand Prix for his long program, with his chin uptilted. He wore a new costume by the renowned Japanese designer Satomi Ito. On his black shirtfront, golden vines moved up his torso like a map of his veins. As Malinin landed one after another of his seven fluttering quads, he gathered the audience’s attention. Something happened, a recognition in those watching him. You know greatness when you see it, because it stops the breath in your throat and triggers a great involuntary rush of an “Ohhhhh!” As Malinin finished, he stamped his skate, as if to establish his imperium over all ice, everywhere. He won the event by almost 30 points.
Malinin contended that his performance was only about “85 percent” of what he was capable of bringing to the Olympics. He wasn’t just flexing. The flex came later, on Instagram, when he posted a video of himself in a practice rink successfully performing an unheard-of quad axel–quad axel combination, to a crashing Babymetal soundtrack. Malinin’s Instagram feed tends to be a good preview of what to expect from him next. Lately, he has also begun teasing a quintuple jump.
Malinin started quietly working toward the quint about two years ago. Lounging on the practice rink’s sofa, he casually acknowledged that he had already successfully landed one. “In front of people?” I asked.
“My parents,” he said.
This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Broke Physics.”
