Ilia Malinin had just finished defending his world title with another sensational performance including six quadruple jumps beneath the lights of a nearly sold-out TD Garden. But as he pounded the ice after his final pose, the gesture wasn’t pure triumph like last year in Montreal. It was the frustration of a perfectionist falling short of a standard no one else is asking him to meet.
“That was definitely because I didn’t land all seven,” the 20-year-old American said afterward. “It’s still the one thing I want to accomplish – whether before the Olympics or sometime in my career – just to land them all and really maximize my technical ability, while also incorporating the rest of the program.”
He had come close. Malinin opened with a clean quad flip, then landed the mythical quad Axel – the dangerous four-and-a-half-revolution jump no other skater in history has landed in competition – though it was marked a quarter under-rotated. But midway through the program, his quad Lutz unraveled into a double, leaving his long-chased “perfect layout” just out of reach once again.
Related: Unstoppable Malinin repeats as world champion with six quadruple jumps
Yet still, the win was emphatic. Malinin’s 318.56-point total left him 31 clear of silver medallist Mikhail Shaidorov and nearly 40 ahead of Yuma Kagiyama, whose error-strewn skate effectively handed Malinin gold before he’d even taken the ice. The outcome was never in doubt. Only perfection was.
The difficulty of Malinin’s technical ceiling is so far above the rest of the field that he can essentially win on difficulty, with enough margin for error to absorb all but the most catastrophic mistakes and still dominate. Call him Simone Biles on ice. The only real drama lies in his own ambition.
“There wasn’t even a single thought about doing an easier program,” Malinin said. “My main goal was to go for this layout. I really trained at home to make sure everything was effortless, comfortable, and consistent. I just wanted to come here and try it – to see what would happen.”
The program he attempted included all six recognized quads in addition to the quad Axel, a configuration beyond the reach of his most ambitious rivals. He refers to it now as the “perfect layout”, a goal he’s been chasing for months, even as he’s remained unbeaten since 2023. He first went for it
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