Ilia Malinin Is Changing the Game

On the day after the opening ceremony of the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games—when choreography replaced competition and the world reveled in pageantry before pressure—the American figure skater Ilia Malinin exists in a rare and precarious space. He is not just participating in these Games; he is arguably arriving as an ambassador for his sport and one of the most-discussed debut athletes. The favorite to win two gold medals, the skater expected to defy physics and redefine the boundaries of the possible, a performer tasked with invigorating global interest in an activity that generally escapes the spotlight outside of the Winter Games. The flurry of expectations is inescapable even for any casual viewer—for Malinin, the flurry could only be described as a blizzard.

His meteoric rise has been fueled through technical astonishment. He is known, even beyond the sport, as the skater who normalized the impossible—Malinin is the singular athlete who has, in competition, landed quadruple variants of all six jumps in the sport. In December’s Grand Prix final, he cranked out seven quads and a backflip landed on a single blade (a skill famously only performed once before in Olympic competition by Surya Bonaly) in one program. That kind of advancement tends to awe the collective brain and elevate the athlete to superhuman status; it also can have an unexpected effect—isolation.

“It might feel a little lonely,” he confesses from his home in Washington, D.C. “You might feel there’s nothing else for you; it’s just going to be here, and that’s it.” It is an admission that cuts against the confidence and ease he projects in every performance or encounter, yet one all too familiar for elite athletes leading the pack and setting new standards. “This year I came in as a different person,” Malinin declares. “I have a fresh mindset and a fresh start. I have the fire inside me to keep pushing myself. Even if I’m at the top, there’s still a part of me that wants to keep going.”

Even at the top, Malinin is only one athlete on an incredibly strong roster of Americans seeking to repeat 2022’s gold in the team event. Last April, Team USA clinched the World Team Trophy; at December’s Grand Prix Final, they scored gold medals in both men’s and women’s singles in addition to ice dance. Amber Glenn and Alysa Liu, both friends of Malinin’s and stars in their own right, are close contenders for the women’s singles gold. Above it all, Team USA has rallied together following last year’s devastating airplane crash above the Potomac River, which took the lives of twenty-eight members of the figure skating community.

“It still doesn’t feel real to this day. I knew all of them personally,” Malinin reflects somberly about the disaster. “It was a really hard time for all of us.” In that shared grief, competition dissolved into responsibility and tightened mutual support. “It’s important for this team to support each other; we need to show that we have each other’s backs,” Malinin affirms. “I want to give a shout out to my teammate Max [Naumov],” Malinin says. “His parents were on that flight. We basically started skating at the same age and have been friends for years already.” Naumov spurred widespread fanfare last month upon qualifying for the Olympic team—his own parents were world champions in pairs skating. Malinin, obviously alert to the parallels in their stories, is steadfast in his support for this teammate, even in light of their competitive relationship. “He’s an amazing person, I’m always going to be here for anything he needs,” he says.

These moments of reflection typically exist outside the bounds of the Olympic narrative, which tends to flatten athletes into medal probabilities and machines rigged for human achievement. Malinin, whose parents competed in the Games themselves, understands that distance well. “People see athletes for what they’ve achieved or what medals they’ve won,” he observes, quickly seeking to break that perspective. “[Viewers] don’t get to see how many hours a day they spent working on this one thing or how much money they sacrificed to try to get to the professional level—everything they have to go through mentally, physically, emotionally just to become the person they are on that stage.” The public may see the outcome. The athlete lives the process.

For an athlete carrying such heavy expectations, that mental framing is crucially grounding. “I tell myself this is just another competition,” Malinin confesses. The simplicity is intentional. “All I have to do is prepare well, train well, and have fun.” Fun, for Malinin, is not a distraction from excellence but a condition of it. “A lot of people forget that the whole point is to enjoy yourself,” he reminds me. “If I have fun and don’t care what happens in the moment, muscle memory just kicks in and it works.” The jumps that have come to define him—the rotations that have awed global audiences—are not executed through force of will alone. They rely on his ability to keep it cool.

That approach has made Malinin something more than a favorite. He has become a reference point. Younger skaters do not just observe his technical prowess; they study how he inhabits the sport. Malinin is acutely aware of that responsibility, and he refuses to shy away from it. “Being a role model for the future of figure skating is something I respect myself for,” he said. “I’m inspiring a newer generation of skaters to find a new vision of skating,”

Today, as the Olympic Games get fully underway and predictions give way to results, Ilia Malinin will be presented as something close to a force of nature. In many ways, he is. No matter the outcome, no one else has come close to his technical dominance and exploding recognition—but in the end he’s just a boy on the ice having the time of his life.

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