Culture
Ilia Malinin, U.S. figure skating’s new star, caps a perfect year and eyes Olympic glory
At the end of his free skate Saturday, Ilia Malinin sprawled out on the ice, eyes closed, soaking it all in. The man known as the “Quad God” had just unleashed a series of quadruple jumps — including the quad axel, a jump that no one else has ever landed — and even a backflip in his typical spectacular style.
The routine had included a fall and several other miscues, but it didn’t matter. Malinin, the rising American who turned 20 on Monday, easily beat Japanese rival Yuma Kagiyama to win the men’s singles competition in the Grand Prix Final, finish an undefeated 2024 and further cement his status as a superstar in the making.
Perhaps the only thing not going Malinin’s way is that the Olympics are in 14 months instead of two.
Since the 2022 Beijing Games, Malinin has become the new force in men’s figure skating, his win Saturday completing a perfect calendar year that included the World Championship gold medal and has made him the sport’s clear No. 1, just over a year before the 2026 Olympics begin in Milan.
Malinin started with a dazzling short program Friday, opening up a near-12-point lead over Kagiyama, the silver medalist at worlds behind Malinin. In Saturday’s free skate, Malinin unleashed a barrage of quads — the axel, lutz, salchow, toe loop, loop and flip — and a crowd-pleasing backflip near the end to claim another major title. He finished with a combined score of 292.12, besting Kagiyama’s 281.78. Japan’s Shun Sato took third with a 270.82.
“I had this idea and this goal that I wanted to achieve here, and I was able to blow it out of the park,” Malinin said in the arena after the win.
A familiar sound for Ilia Malinin. 🇺🇸
He stands on the top of the podium after successfully defending his #GPFigure title. 🥇 pic.twitter.com/QkhbfrWP8f
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) December 7, 2024
The Grand Prix Final is the culmination of figure skating’s annual Grand Prix series, inviting only the top six skaters or pairs in each discipline. It’s among the most prestigious worldwide titles in the sport, after the Olympics and the World Championships.
The win capped a stellar weekend in Grenoble, France, for the U.S. with three titles. Earlier Saturday, Amber Glenn won the women’s competition, and Madison Chock and Evan Bates — the two-time defending world champions — won the ice dance for the second straight year. The Americans also took a gold and two silvers in the junior competition.
Malinin was born and raised in Virginia. His parents, Roman Skorniakov and Tatiana Malinina, are former Olympic figure skaters with Russian and Uzbekistani heritage. They relocated to the U.S. and live in Vienna, Va., where Malinin learned to skate at the facility where his parents coach. He attends George Mason University.
Malinin might already be a household name for casual Olympics fans if not for a decision in 2022 that kept him off the U.S. team in Beijing.
American Ilia Malinin, who turned 20 on Monday, has ascended to the top of men’s figure skating and enters 2025 as the sport’s clear No. 1. (Laurent Cipriani / AP)
At the U.S. Championships that year, one month before the Olympics, Malinin — who had just turned 18 — finished a surprising second place behind Nathan Chen, making a strong case to be named to the team. But the selection committee — not required to choose based on the results alone — instead opted for experience and picked former Olympians Vincent Zhou and Jason Brown — the third- and fourth-place finishers at nationals — to join Chen in Beijing and made Malinin the first alternate.
It worked out for the U.S. — it won team gold after Russian skater Kamila Valieva was disqualified and her score subtracted — but it meant Malinin would have to wait for his Olympic debut.
In the time since, he has skyrocketed to the top of the sport. After the Olympics, the Americans sent Malinin to the 2022 World Championships, where he finished ninth. Then he competed in the World Junior Championships and won gold for his first major victory.
From there, he competed on the senior circuit full time. The 2022-23 season brought gold at the U.S. Championships and bronze at worlds and the Grand Prix Final, as well as his first successful quad axel. Now, in 2024, he’s been unbeatable — World Championships, Grand Prix Final, U.S. Championships — gold in all.
Before his arrow-shot up the rankings, Malinin gained recognition for an unprecedented move. Until Sept. 15, 2022, no figure skater had landed a fully rotated quadruple axel — four full spins in the air off the axel jump, which is considered the hardest in the sport and starts forward-facing, necessitating an extra half rotation to complete.
That changed when Malinin unleashed it at an event in Lake Placid, N.Y.
History. Made.🤯
17-year-old Ilia Malinin 🇺🇸 becomes the first figure skater to land a quadruple Axel in competition.
Full story ➡️ https://t.co/cIHBkGIZFH#FigureSkatingpic.twitter.com/jysyCrF0lr
— The Olympic Games (@Olympics) September 15, 2022
He’s repeated the feat several times since and goes by the nickname “Quadg0d” on Instagram in honor of the accomplishment. He’s said in interviews he’s considering trying a quintuple version of the jump.
It’s his signature move but far from the extent of his skill. Malinin’s athletic routines have produced massive scores — including a world-record free skate at this year’s World Championships. He wasted no time breaking out a backflip in competition in October after a ban on the move — in place since 1977 — was lifted earlier this year.
Can we talk about Ilia Malinin casually doing a backflip in his program real quick? 🫨 #SkateAmerica pic.twitter.com/vcafwJn2yZ
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 21, 2024
Malinin finished 2024 with seven wins in seven events. He hasn’t finished out of the top three in any event since that 2022 World Championships he competed in after missing out on Beijing. And the next major event is on his home turf — the 2025 worlds are in Boston from March 23 to 30.
There’s still another year of competition until the Olympics begin in Milan in February 2026, time for another top contender like Kagiyama or France’s Adam Siao Him Fa — the bronze medalist at last year’s worlds who missed this Grand Prix Final with an injury — to chase Malinin down. But the American enters 2025 as the clear No. 1 in the sport.
Related reading
(Photo: Jurij Kodrun / International Skating Union via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Los Angeles, Ca12 minutes agoMan stabbed to death after violent dog attack on Hollywood Walk of Fame
-
Detroit, MI32 minutes ago
Black Legacy Day to be celebrated May 30th in Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA42 minutes agoA 1906 fire burned 200,000 books. More than a century later, one was returned | CNN
-
Dallas, TX47 minutes agoCowboys news: More moves that Dallas could make this offseason
-
Miami, FL54 minutes agoHere’s a guide to the seven World Cup teams (and their fans) headed to Miami | Honolulu Star-Advertiser
-
Boston, MA57 minutes agoStormy Saturday, slightly sunnier Sunday – Boston News, Weather, Sports | WHDH 7News
-
Denver, CO1 hour agoStorm threat for northeastern Colorado Saturday; sunny and warmer Sunday
-
Seattle, WA1 hour agoWEST SEATTLE SATURDAY: 33 options!
