Figure skating is nothing without tension. Humans speed across slick ice, balancing on a thin metal blade and making sharp turns. The athletes defy physics, jumping and twisting their bodies in the air, seemingly faster than you can blink. Millimeters can mean the difference between success and splat, risk goes hand in hand with reward, and winning or losing can come down to decimal points.
The paradox of watching American Ilia Malinin skate is that he’s so good, there often isn’t any suspense. He lands the most difficult jumps. He breaks scoring records left and right. And when he skates his best, the only real question is who is getting second place.
The 21-year-old “quad god” has become a staggering, intimidating constant.
Malinin’s astonishing jumping ability and his vaunted quadruple axel make him the heavy favorite to take home gold at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. Malinin is already changing the way we think about figure skating in the US and what is believed to be possible within the sport. If he wins, it would be a historic achievement.
And the one staggering thing to keep in mind watching Ilia Malinin in these Olympics? He could get even better.
Why the quad axel makes Ilia Malinin the favorite for figure skating gold
Whether you’re a fan of figure skating or not, you are probably aware of the sport’s most famous jump: the triple axel, a three-and-a-half revolution trick that has immortalized and haunted so many routines in Olympic history.
Canadian Vern Taylor became the first person to land it in international competition in 1978, and many attempted and then perfected the jump in the decades that followed. The axel is considered the most difficult of all the jumps across skating’s four levels, mainly because of its extra half revolution and its forward-facing takeoff. (Skaters launch themselves back-first in all the other jumps, which is considered easier, and why a triple lutz is less difficult and thus worth fewer points than a triple axel.)
As time went on, skaters began adding more and more turns to the sport’s other five jumps — flip, loop, lutz, toe loop, salchow — but adding an additional revolution to the axel seemed too difficult.
Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, arguably the greatest figure skater of all time, attempted a quad axel at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, but did not land it. Perhaps the human body simply wasn’t made to jump that high, spin that fast, absorb that much torque, all while carving through ice.
Forty-four years later after Taylor’s first triple axel and months after Hanyu’s Olympic try at a quad, Ilia Malinin did the impossible.
Malinin, then 17, landed the first quadruple axel in history — the International Skating Union only counts jumps if they’re landed in a competition — about 22 seconds into his long program at Skate America in Norwood, Massachusetts. Malinin has only lost one major competition since that 2022 season, coming in second at the 2023 Grand Prix de France.
If someone could explain exactly why it is that Malinin is able to hit the quadruple axel when no one else can, they’d have the entire skating world knocking on their door, pulling up in armored trucks filled to the brim with money. Generational athletes — Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, LeBron James, and Malinin — are the greatest because they can do things that we can’t fully explain.
Figure skating experts told me that Malinin is a master technician, which allows him to maximize the height and rotation on his jumps. Meanwhile, scientists have studied Malinin’s quad axel and believe the secret is that he jumps higher vertically on it compared to his peers’ triple axels. The stuff that physics still can’t explain is Malinin magic.
“It is a differentiator,” Jackie Wong, a skating journalist, analyst, and founder of the website Rocker Skating, told Vox right before flying to Milan, where he’s covering the 2026 Games. “It is something that allows Ilia to build up such a huge advantage that he can win competitions by a massive number of points over the best skaters in the world.”
“The amazing thing about Ilia is that he puts this really hard stuff out there and executes it.”
— Jackie Wong, skating journalist and analyst
The way skating is currently scored puts a high value on and ultimately rewards risk. The trickiest elements of a program are worth the most points. The more you land and the better that you land them, the higher the score. And there is nothing in men’s skating that is trickier or worth more than Malinin’s quad axel. (I say it’s his because he’s still the only person in the universe that can land it.)
“We’ve seen skaters in the past who have done the risk and reward thing and put out a whole bunch of hard stuff, but then they don’t land it,” Wong said. “The amazing thing about Ilia is that he puts this really hard stuff out there and executes it.”
I asked Wong to compare Malinin’s talent to other star athletes. Is he the Steph Curry or Caitlin Clark of figure skating? Wong said no, because even though only a few players can shoot from the distance they do, basketball doesn’t allow Curry and Clark to score more than three points at a time. Wong finally settled on one example, with a few caveats: Simone Biles, arguably the greatest American athlete of all time.
To be clear, Wong said, Biles’s dominance over gymnastics cannot be compared or replicated. Her superiority and longevity is singular. But Malinin, like Biles, is doing things that no other competitor can do and hitting these elements — potentially seven quadruple jumps in his long program — at a consistent clip. Malinin, like Biles, has taken a sport that’s judged to the decimal point and turned competitions into blowouts. At the 2025 World Championships, Malinin outscored world silver medalist Mikhail Shaidorov by more than 31 points.
“He’s lost, I think, one competition in the last three years,” Wong said. “In figure skating, that’s pretty rare.”
What Ilia Malinin means for US Figure Skating
Malinin and his quad axel have the chance to do something special in Milan: If he wins, it will be the first time since 1988 that the United States will have won gold in men’s figure skating in consecutive Olympics Games.
Malinin may also symbolize what skating experts see as not only the US’s return to dominance, but a paradigm shift for the next generation of American skaters.
After Scott Hamilton’s win in 1984 and Brian Boitano’s dazzling performance in ’88, the US men went through a gold medal drought. Evan Lysacek won in 2010, but that was largely considered an upset. After Lysacek, the US wouldn’t get on top of the podium again until Nathan Chen in 2022.
Chen landed five quadruple jumps on his way to victory — a feat considered staggering at the time. Chen didn’t just eke by the competition; he won by more than 20 points. Malinin, who was not selected for those Games, was paying attention, according to Justin Dillon, the US Figure Skating’s chief of high performance.
“When we have an athlete in a discipline to look up to, all of the young athletes that watch the Olympics think, ‘I can do that too,’” Dillon told Vox. “Ilia watching Nathan makes Ilia possible, and then the next generation watching Ilia makes them possible.”
Dillon and other experts I spoke to said that having a talent like Chen immediately followed by one like Malinin is a figure skating anomaly. Both Chen and Malinin are considered generational athletes, and the US having both athletes as favorites in consecutive Olympics is akin to winning the lottery.
Even if US Figure Skating doesn’t find Malinin’s successor during the next quadrennial, the fact that a new generation will be watching him at these Games helps broaden the pool of potential skaters — athletes that Dillon and US Figure Skating want to cultivate and grow.
Before taking on his current role, Dillon was hired as US Figure Skating’s development director in 2016. He was tasked with spotting young talent, a space that Dillon says “never really existed” in the federation. Dillon traveled across the US and scouted juniors, looking for strong skaters that the US could develop. Several members of the 2026 US Olympic figure skating team, including Malinin, Alysa Liu, and Isabeau Levito, are athletes he saw on the trail.
I asked Dillon what US Figure Skating is looking for when trying to identify the next Chen or Malinin. The key, he said, is finding kids who can quickly rotate in the air. The speed of their rotations — more than the height of their jumps — is the skill that most directly translates to quadruple jumps at the next level.
The idea that he could get even better might, for the first time in quite a while, inject real tension in Malinin’s skating.
“Quads are usually developed in the teenage years, and you need to identify the talent before that age,” Dillon said. “Eight, nine, and 10 years old — pretty much around that age.”
Yes, that means spotting potential quad jumpers when they’re third- and fourth-graders. It’s a good strategy to develop talent, and it’s a departure from how things may have been done in previous eras. But Wong, the skating analyst, noted that the kids who are now doing quad jumps in juniors aren’t inherently more talented than their forebears. “It’s that they were prepared to do these jumps at a much earlier age,” he says.
Quads dictate scores, which dictate medals, which then dictates the kinds of training and development that figure skating federations are employing.
“Once those dominoes were set, all of the coaching techniques, how you think about young skaters, and what you prepare them for — all of that changed,” Wong said. “It’s a whole chain effect. It didn’t happen overnight.”
How good can Malinin get?
The conventional wisdom of figure skating is that there will always be tension between athleticism and artistry — that the more that the sport values one, the less care will be paid to the other. And it makes sense that the more points quadruple jumps are worth, the more skaters will focus on them as opposed to layback spins or spirals.
But Malinin is so good, he doesn’t necessarily have to choose. He has the potential to be both a master technician and a wonderful artist. It’s probably not a coincidence that Malinin cites Hanyu Yuzuru as his inspiration. What made Hanyu so special was that he was able to blend artistry — the shapes he created with his body, the position of his arms and legs, his connection to the music, creating beauty in between the jumps, his step sequences, etc. — with sheer athleticism.
Sandra Bezic, a Canadian champion pairs skater and choreographer, believes Malinin has a desire to get better at all facets of the sport, not just the quads.
“He’s such a charismatic performer. He cares about his connection to the audience. He cares about his music. He cares about his choreography,” she told Vox. “We’re all a little blinded by his incredible jumps, the multiple quads.” But she believes it’s worth keeping an eye on his artistry too, especially as he gets older. “From what I’ve observed, I think he’s excited to continue to develop in that way.”
“You can’t be an artist without living,” Bezic said, noting that, at 21, Malinin is still young. (Hanyu was 19 when he won his first Olympics.) “You have to live. You have to experience life and loss and love. You can have innate qualities and feel the music and have that in you, but you won’t reach your potential until you’ve lived.”
That there’s still more for Malinin to learn and untapped potential left for him to fulfill is wild to think about. During the past three years, he’s made the sport’s most difficult tricks look routine and turned competitions into coronations. The idea that he could get even better might, for the first time in quite a while, inject real tension in Malinin’s skating.
