Who Is Ilia Malinin? What to Know About the Team USA Figure Skating Superstar

Figure skating world champion Ilia Malinin from Fairfax, Virginia is chasing Olympic gold in Italy

Malinin gained the nickname “the Quad God” after he became the first person to land a quadruple axel in competition - a jump that requires a skater to spin four and half times in mid-air.

Why American “quad god” Ilia Malinin skates like no one else

Ilia Malinin, 21, is the heavy favorite to win the gold medal for the United States at the Milan Cortina Olympics. | Tim Clayton/Getty Images Figure skating is nothing without tension. Humans speed across slick ice, balancing on a thin metal blade and making sharp turns. The athletes defy physics, jumping and twisting their bodies in the air, seemingly faster than you can blink. Millimeters can mean the difference between success and splat, ris…

Inside Ilia Malinin’s Push to Transform Men’s Figure Skating

American figure skater and two-time world champion Ilia Malinin enters the 2026 Olympics as the gold medal favorite after two undefeated seasons.

Who Is Ilia Malinin? What to Know About the Team USA Figure Skating Superstar

Team USA figure skater Ilia Malinin is one of the biggest names at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina — but he’s set out to prove that, despite his incredible talent on the ice, he’s not so different from the fans watching at home.  “Everyone sees me at competitions and I’m just so focused, I’m really in a different mindset where I’m pretty much as perfect as I can be,” Malinin, 21, exclusively told Us Weekly before the start of the Game…

Why the Triple (and Quadruple) Axel Is So Hard

Even casual fans of figure skating have likely heard of the triple axel. And now, thanks to U.S. men’s champion Ilia Malinin, you’ll be hearing a lot about the quadruple axel, or quad axel, too. What makes it so impressive? Any axel jump–single, double, triple, or quad–actually involves an extra half rotation. So a single axel is really 1.5 turns in the air, the double 2.5, and so on. So yes, that means that Malinin performs 4.5 revolutions in t…

Ilia Malinin to make Olympic debut in figure skating team event

Ilia Malinin will take Olympic ice for the first time in competition in the men's short program segment of the Olympic figure skating team event.