Ilia Malinin Wasn’t Planning to Be a Figure Skater. Now He’s Favored to Win Olympic Gold

If both your parents are Olympic figure skaters, there are a few things you might expect: getting introduced to the ice at an early age, lessons and competitions that increase in intensity, and frequent conversations about following in the family footsteps.

Well, for Ilia Malinin, whose mother Tatiana Malinina and father Roman Skorniakov both competed for Uzbekistan in the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics, it didn’t exactly go that way. 

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“They didn’t want me to skate,” says Malinin. “They didn’t really talk about their careers, or how they skated [at the Olympics]. They knew how hard it was—how much time, effort, and sacrifice goes into it—and they wanted me to have a different life.”

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Growing up in Virginia, Malinin picked up soccer and gymnastics, thinking he might be a professional soccer player, but since his parents were coaching at a rink near their home, he would often spend all day there. “I could get on the ice and do what I wanted,” says Malinin, who first stepped on the ice at age 6. “But it wasn’t so serious. It was more a recreational hobby.”

Blame his genes, but it wasn’t long before he fell in love with the sport. “I wanted to compete and travel, even if it still wasn’t at a very high level,” he says. He started progressing so quickly, however, and showing such commitment to learning new skills that his parents realized they couldn’t keep him from following their path. Still, he insists that at the time he wasn’t entertaining Olympic dreams. “I thought about it, and at the time, I didn’t think I could make it there,” he says.

Now a two-time world champion and four-time U.S. national champion, Malinin, 21, is heading to his first Olympics as more than just another figure skater. He’s setting new standards for what’s possible on the ice, easily winning his competitions by more than 50 points (most margins are traditionally in the single digits) thanks to his dizzying array of quadruple jumps. In December, the “Quad God,” as he calls himself in his social media handles, became the first skater to land seven of them in a single program.

“Ilia is an over-the-moon, once-in-a-generation skater, and the things he does, I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” says 1998 Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski. “It’s almost like he is competing in a different competition from everyone else.”

The favorite in men’s figure skating in Milan, Malinin says it wasn’t until this year that his parents really started to talk to him about the Olympics, advising him to think of the Games as just another competition, and to pace himself so he’s able to perform at his best when his name is called for his short program at the Milan Ice Skating Center on Feb. 10.

In some ways, his relatively late start to competitive skating may have ultimately given him his advantage. “I was a little behind everyone else,” he says. “I was still learning, and the other skaters at my level had more experience and were doing more difficult elements.” To make up for lost time, he and his parents worked tirelessly on technique and perfecting every aspect of the mechanics of jumping. That foundation likely made it easier for him to add first single jumps, then another rotation, and another, until he could execute four evolutions for each of the six jumps skaters perform.

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In his typically easygoing manner, Malinin shrugs off the amount of technical skill required to pull off those jumps in quadruple form. “I pretty much have to think of doing the same thing, just with more power or more speed,” he says. “The concept and technique should still be the same.”

When it comes to his history-making quadruple axel, which no other skater has ever pulled off successfully in a competition, Malinin is equally modest. “I understand why people think going from a triple to a quad is harder, but for me, I kind of picked it up naturally. Going from a double to a triple was tougher for me because I had to learn how to rotate more.” Learning the quad axel, he says “felt easier because I was already aware of the process, if that makes sense.”

The new technical bar that Malinin is setting is critical for the evolution of the sport, says 1984 Olympic men’s champion Scott Hamilton. “No one likes watching a sport that they don’t understand,” he says, referring to the previously esoteric criteria judges used to make subjective evaluations in comparing one skater against another. “If you want it to be a sport, we now have these athletic elements that are virtually impossible, that one unique human being has found a way to master, where no one else in the world was able to do it at that level. That should be rewarded in every possible way, with the medal, with the applause, and with the appreciation of this generational, or maybe even millennial, talent.”

Although Malinin’s journey to this Olympics felt almost destined, it’s also a redemption of sorts. Malinin finished second at the 2022 U.S. nationals, which weighs heavily in the Olympic team selection, but he still wasn’t selected for the Beijing Games. While he says he wasn’t initially expecting to make the team that year, after skating so well and finishing second, it was “disappointing” when he was passed over. But this setback motivated him to return to the rink and refocus his energies on building a skating career, beginning with a berth on the Olympic team in Milan. And that passion drove him to redefine men’s figure skating in the process as he dedicated himself to making it almost impossible for him to be left off the team again. “There’s now a reality that we just saw a human being…do seven quads in seven jumping passes, and six of those were with different takeoffs, and one of them is the quad axel, which no one else in the world is doing,” says Hamilton. “It’s a wonderful time in our sport’s history.”

To get to this point, Malinin spent time with reigning Olympic men’s champion Nathan Chen’s coach, Rafael Arutyunyan, in California, who provided tips on improving his toe loop and flip jumps, and perhaps most importantly, managing his energy during the program so he has the stamina to perform quadruple jump after quadruple jump, as he’s likely to do in Milan in his free program. Equally valuable to Malinin was observing and talking to Chen himself about what he did to get ready for the Beijing Olympics—“how he trained, how he prepared and how much time and effort he put into not only the jumps but everything you have to do in skating,” says Malinin. “It gave me an understanding of what I needed to do in my skating.”

While those jumps are certainly the big draw in watching Malinin, he also understands the importance of what comes between them. “I learned to find my own style, which I would explain as really a contemporary and effortless-looking style that makes things look easy, but at the same time, I want people to know that what any of us do is really hard,” he says. “It’s a judged sport, and not only is it super athletic and you have to have enough strength and energy to pull off these jumps and tricks, but you also have to make them look nice, clean, and effortless. That’s part of the competition.”

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In crafting his programs for this year, with the realization that he could be skating them on his sport’s biggest stage, Malinin wanted to send a special message in his free program, which is less restrictive than the short program in terms of required elements that skaters have to perform. “It’s all about the process of going through life, which can have its ups and downs, and different changes and obstacles can get in your way,” he says of the themes of his program. “But in the end I feel like the goal in life is to be the best version of yourself that you can be. The whole program describes the process of finding what you are and what you need to do to become that better person.”

Malinin worked with renown choreographer Shae-Lynn Bourne, an Olympic ice dancer, who created Chen’s free program in 2022. Set to “A Voice,” it includes spoken word that Malinin recorded himself. “I really want this to be something people understand, and then it struck me: ‘What if I add my own spoken word to it?’” he says. The program starts with Malinin intoning, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

“Of course it’s a risk because you never know what people will say about it,” he says. “But I think it’s the best program I’ve ever done in my life. And it’s something that really speaks to me. As I skate it more and more, the message really shows.”

Now that he’s fulfilled his dream of making an Olympic team, Malinin is wrapping his head around the possibility of becoming an Olympic champion. “I never thought I would be at the top of this sport,” he says. And yet here he is, the most watched men’s figure skater in the world, expected to take home gold in Milan, but more than that, to continue raising the bar and changing the sport of figure skating.