TWO months ago, after easily winning his third consecutive US Figure Skating national title, Ilia Malinin showed up at his rink to train for the world championships, yet he could not bring himself to skate for even a second.
Malinin, the overwhelming favourite to win the gold medal in next year’s Winter Olympics in Italy, had laced up his skates, looked around and felt an emptiness that stopped him.
That week, 28 people involved in skating had died when an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River, killing all 67 passengers.
Among them were young skaters, including three from the Washington Figure Skating Club, which is Malinin’s club, and others who at times would use the rink in Reston, Virginia, where he trains.
A coach, a skater and his father, and a whole family – two young sisters and their parents – from that club died, and Malinin, who is 20, was so brokenhearted in the weeks afterward that he could not even bear to say their names, he said.
“Skating usually helps me handle hard things going on in my life, but it was just too emotional to be there,” Malinin said in an interview with The New York Times the first week of March.
“I tried to have a productive day of skating. But I just couldn’t take my mind to another place. I just couldn’t.”
When he returned to the rink several days later, he said, he redoubled his efforts to be the best men’s singles skater in the world, one bound for stardom at the Winter Games nearly 10 months from now.
He said he focused on fine-tuning his programmes and immersed himself in them, determined to dedicate his performances in Boston at the World Figure Skating Championships to the people who died.
The result was a pair of spectacular programmes that brought Malinin his second consecutive world championship, which he won by about 31 points, a colossal edge in a sport in which margins of victory are often measured in single digits, or even tenths.
Ilia Malinin competes in his short programme at the world championships in Boston on March 27. — NYT
The capacity crowd at TD Garden for the free skate was on its feet long before his performance was done, and for good reasons: Malinin, from Vienna, Virginia, is a dynamic skater who is single-handedly lifting the sport into another stratosphere with his technical skills and his ability to connect with a new, younger audience.
He landed a breathtaking six quadruple jumps, including a quad axel, which requires a mind-boggling 4½ rotations in the air.
No one else in the world has done it in international competition. No one else has landed six quads in one programme, either.
For years, the top skaters in the world could only dream of landing the quad axel, a jump made harder by its forward-facing entry. But Malinin, now a student at George Mason University, first landed it when he was 17.
He said performing those quads at worlds meant a lot to him because he did it in front of a crowd in his home country, although he couldn’t hide his disappointment that he hadn’t executed the seven that he had planned.
As a teenager, Malinin – a hoodie-and-jeans kind of guy – started calling himself “Quad God” for his ability to execute quad jumps.
But now his unique performances are just as memorable. With his flowing movements and unique body shapes, his routines could double as modern dances.
For the long programme, he marched into the rink, taking each step with determination, as if heading for a street fight.
His song was “I’m Not a Vampire (Revamped)” by the rock band Falling in Reverse, and his outfit matched the theme of the music.
It was a blinged out version of what looked like Dracula’s tuxedo, and under the lights the array of sequins and rhinestones on it made him look sprinkled with glitter.
He moved masterfully, in synchronicity with the song’s every note, and he even shouted along with a few of the more aggressive vocals.
Malinin logged 110.41 points in the short programme, one of the highest short programme scores ever at an international competition, beating Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama by 3.32 points.
After that programme, Kagiyama, the Olympic silver medallist at the 2022 Beijing Games, said he was in awe of Malinin’s transformation from a skater largely known for the strength, speed and timing required to land impeccable quads to one with artistry nearly as untouchable.
“I’m starting to think he’s invincible,” Kagiyama said.
Malinin said his practices before worlds were easy. The jumps. The spins. The movements to the music. It all felt so right, he said.
Yet at the rink, there were times when he thought about the skaters who died, he admitted, forcing him to pause.
His parents – Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skornyakov, who skated for Uzbekistan at past Olympics – coach him and helped him regroup, he said.
Those skaters he knew were not there anymore, gliding by or standing back, wide-eyed, to watch him and learn from him, or to train next to him, and that “really upsets me,” Malinin said. — NYT
