Vanity Fair
The 21-year-old two-time world champion and self-appointed “quad god” might just be the best figure skater in the world. Now he’s going for gold in Milan.
Before Ilia Malinin, the quadruple axel was somewhat of a myth. It requires the skater to vault into the air facing forward and complete four and a half revolutions before landing backward. Quads are hard enough. The quad axel adds another half revolution to the jump. It has a base value one point higher than the next most difficult move and is considered so dangerous that few skaters dare to even try it. To land it clean, those four and a half turns need to be done in less than a second. Blink and you’ll miss it. Malinin did it in 2022 at just 17 years old. When American figure skater and Olympian Adam Ripponwatched Malinin pull it off for the first time, he called it “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do on the ice.”
Since then the 21-year-old Virginia native has landed it 15 more times in competition. He’s still the only skater to have ever pulled it off.
“At first my parents and people thought I was crazy when I wanted to land that quad axel,” Malinin tells me. “They didn’t think I would be able to do it. People would say, ‘I don’t think I’ll see a quad axel in my lifetime.’ ”
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