He’s been called the Quad God, skating’s great innovator, the next Olympic champion. On Saturday night, in front of a roaring crowd at TD Garden, Ilia Malinin made it official: he is once again the best figure skater in the world.
The 20-year-old American delivered another unforgettable free skate to drop the curtain on the world figure skating championships, landing six quadruple jumps to claim his second straight world title. His total score of 318.56 put him more than 31 points clear of Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov, who took silver, and Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, whose took bronze despite a mistake-laden routine that saw him drop from second after the short program.
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It was a defining night for the sport and for Malinin, who has not lost a competition since 2023 and now adds another gold medal to a résumé that already includes a Grand Prix final title, multiple quad-jump records, and an ever-growing legend.
Skating last to I’m Not a Vampire by the American post-metalcore band Falling in Reverse, Malinin opened with a quadruple flip, the quad Axel, a quad lutz, a quad loop, along with a quad toe and quad Salchow, both in combination.
The qual axel – heart-stopping four-and-a-half-revolution jump that has proven beyond the reach of the sport’s most ambitious talents – has been landed only 15 times in competition after Saturday, all of them by the northern Virginia native, since he first pulled it off at the US Classic two years ago when he was 17.
It was a defining night for the sport and for Malinin, who has not lost a competition since 2023 and now adds another gold medal to a résumé that already includes a Grand Prix final title, multiple quad-jump records, and an ever-growing legend.
The US won three of the four events at a world figure skating championships for the first time in history: Malinin in men’s singles, Alysa Liu in women’s singles and Madison Chock and Evan Bates in ice dance.
Full report to follow.
