BOSTON — Ilia Malinin's top rival said this week that he's starting to think the self-proclaimed "Quad God" is invincible.
With every effortless quadruple jump Saturday at TD Garden, every elegant twist, every precise bend of his skate, a slightly different word came to mind: Inevitable.
Malinin defended his world title in mesmerizing and dominant fashion at the 2025 world championships in Boston, landing six quads during his free skate before cracking a smile in the middle of the ice and basking in the cheers from the home crowd. He is just the sixth American man to win consecutive world figure skating championships, joining a who's who of the sport's biggest names − Nathan Chen, Brian Boitano and Dick Button among them.
When asked on NBC afterwards how it felt to be Ilia Malinin in this moment, he smiled.
"I don't know," he said. "I'm tired."
It was yet another memorable performance from Malinin, the 20-year-old from Vienna, Virginia who will enter the 2026 Winter Olympics as the heavy favorite to win gold − and likely one of the most well-known stars on Team USA.
After six quads, including the famous quad axel, he also landed a backflip and his signature "raspberry twist." When the music stopped playing, he collapsed on the ice, laying motionless as the crowd continued to cheer.
"That should not be possible," Tara Lipinski said on NBC. "It's like he undoes gravity."
Malinin's total score of 318.56 put him a whopping 31 points ahead of Kazakhstan's Mikhail Shaidorov, who finished second. Japan's Yuma Kagiyama, who has recently been the only other skater to even be in the same ballpark as Malinin, finished a distant third, while American Jason Brown's emotional free skate boosted him to ninth. Andrew Torgashev, the other U.S. skater in the field, finished 22nd.
Malinin's title-clinching performance Saturday followed Madison Chock and Evan Bates' victory in ice dance earlier in the day, and Alysa Liu's stunning performance to win the women's singles competition one night earlier. It's the first time Team USA has had three winners at one edition of the world figure skating championships, which have had at least three disciplines since 1908.
Of those three American titles, Malinin's might come as the least surprising. But that doesn't make it any less impressive.
It's telling that, ahead of these world championships, the most anticipated part of Malinin's free skate is how many quads he would attempt. He entered Saturday as the only person in history to land six in one program, as well as the only one to attempt seven. Malinin is also the only skater to successfully land a quad axel − which, despite its name, actually features 4.5 ...
