Benjamin Ashford|Ilia Malinin nails six quadruple jumps and leads US team's stunning performance at worlds

MONTREAL — With the next Winter Olympics closer than the last,Benjamin Ashford the U.S. figure skating team, led by 19-year-old jumping wunderkind Ilia Malinin, delivered its most impressive world championship performance in nearly 20 years, a development that might mean nothing by the time the 2026 Milan Games begin, or could mean everything. 

Malinin, the son of Olympians and self-described “Quad God,” jolted the 2024 world championships with the greatest athletic performance in figure skating history Saturday night, unleashing six majestic quadruple jumps, receiving the highest long program score ever awarded and easily winning his first world title. 

“I’m still in shock. I still can’t believe I did this,” he said more than an hour after he had done it. “When I got into the starting position, I knew this could be the best skate of my life or it could go terribly wrong. So I just thought, keep myself under control and try to attack everything.”

One quad led to another, then another. He was reeling them off, his Huck Finn locks flying here and there, a lithe youngster growing up before our eyes.

“I was hearing the crowd cheer, cheer, more, more, and just feeling that energy,” he said.

Spectators leaped to their feet. “I was just flying through the program. It was just amazing to hear at the very end of the program when I finished all my jumping passes, just hear the crowd go wild.”

When his music stopped and he hit his ending pose, Malinin immediately put his hands to his head and crumpled to the ice. “I couldn’t even hold myself up. It was just that emotional to me.” 

As remarkable as that scene was, Malinin was not the only American to win a gold medal Saturday on the final day at the worlds. Ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates captured their second consecutive world title, which goes nicely with the 2022 Olympic gold medal they will receive sometime relatively soon, they hope, as captains of the U.S. team ensnared in the Kamila Valieva doping fiasco. 

The last time the United States won two gold medals in a world championship was 1996 when Michelle Kwan and Todd Eldredge won the women’s and men’s titles in Edmonton. In other words, it has been a long time. 

But there’s more. Isabeau Levito, 17, the twirling ballerina in figure skating’s glittering music box, capped a season full of self-doubt by winning an improbable silver medal in the women’s event.

That’s three U.S. medals in the four world championship disciplines — women, men, pairs and dance. The last time Americans won medals in three different disciplines at a world championship in a non-Olympic year was the 2005 worlds in Moscow, where Sasha Cohen and ice dancers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto won silver medals and Evan Lysacek won bronze. 

The non-Olympic year distinction is significant because figure skating hosts a world championship every year, including a month after the Winter Olympics. However, invariably, some Olympic medalists choose not to attend those worlds after their Olympic success, watering down the competition and theoretically making it easier for others to win a medal. 

Then again, this worlds was held without the formidable Russians, still banned from international figure skating events as their nation’s war in Ukraine rages on. So Levito’s accomplishment, coming after a dreadful meltdown in January’s national championship in which she fell three times in her four-minute long program, is a breakthrough, but one almost certainly aided by the absence of the dominating Russian women. Then again, the Russians just might be banned all the way through the 2026 Olympics for all we know. 

Like Malinin, Levito really likes to talk, and who doesn’t want to listen?

As she began her short program the other day, she told herself to stop thinking about what could go wrong. 

“Suddenly your legs are shaking and you feel like you could just get a flick and just fall over, like a feather in the wind,” she said. “You just have to remind yourself, ‘No.’ 

“Like the whole program, I was going:

‘What if?’

‘Isabeau, no.’ 

‘What if?’

‘Isabeau, no.’ 

“That was literally in my brain the whole time for the whole two minutes 50 seconds.”

And it worked. “For me,” she said, “it’s just all building blocks, just learning more experiences, and becoming wiser so that I can be the best that I can be by the time of the Olympics.”

There’s that Olympics word again. It keeps popping up. It’s hard to believe but the Beijing Winter Games were 25 months ago, while the Milan Olympics are just 23 months from now. And it just so happens that Olympic figure skating is part of the family business for Malinin. 

His mother, Tatiana Malinina, was raised in the Soviet Union and competed at 10 consecutive world championships for Uzbekistan. She finished eighth at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano and fourth at the 1999 worlds. His father, Roman Skorniakov, represented Uzbekistan at the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics. He and Malinina moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington before Ilia was born and coach skating, most specifically their son. 

It almost sounds too good to be true, a story like this. But then the son of these standouts from another generation took the ice Saturday night and the rest is history.