When we last checked in with Quad God, aka figure skater Ilia Malinin, he was busy winning the 2024 figure skating world championships while landing six quad jumps. Now Malinin is back, and this weekend he competed a free skate that has him attempting seven quads, plus a now-legal backflip. Look, there's no need to get too technical here. It's. Seven. Freaking. Quads. (No one has ever landed seven clean in competition.) Sometimes, the facts explain themselves.
Malinin didn't land all seven quads on Sunday at the U.S. figure skating championships, but his entire free skate is still impressive as hell.
Malinin finished with 333.31 points, putting him a whopping 46.82 ahead of his nearest competitor, Andrew Torgashev, who finished with 286.49 points. The record for the highest score in an international figure skating competition was set by a familiar name to U.S. figure skating fans, Nathan Chen, back in 2019. Chen's score was 335.30.
Will Malinin surpass it? Nothing is promised in sports, but it seems safe to say that Malinin is definitely going to try, and world championships are just two months away. As figure skater Jimmy Ma said afterward, per the Associated Press, "I don’t even think of Ilia as competition anymore because it’s not something I think I can achieve. It's just an honor to be friends and compete with two people who can be considered GOATs in their own way."
