Two months ago, after easily winning his third straight U.S. Figure Skating national title, Ilia Malinin showed up at his rink to train for the world championships, yet could not bring himself to skate for even a second.
Malinin, the overwhelming gold medal favorite for next year’s Olympics in Italy, had laced up his skates, looked around and felt an emptiness that stopped him.
That week, 28 people involved in skating had died when an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River, killing all 67 passengers. Among them were young skaters, including three from the Washington Figure Skating Club, Malinin’s club, and others who at times would use the rink in Reston, Va., where he trains.
A coach, a skater and his father, and a whole family — two young sisters and their parents — from that club died, and Malinin, who is 20, was so brokenhearted in the weeks afterward that he could not even bear to say their names, he said.
“Skating usually helps me handle hard things going on in my life, but it was just too emotional to be there,” Malinin said in an interview with The New York Times the first week of March. “I tried to have a productive day of skating. But I just couldn’t take my mind to another place. I just couldn’t.”
When he returned to the rink several days later, he said, he redoubled his efforts to be the best men’s singles skater in the world, one bound for stardom at the Winter Games nearly 10 months from now.
He said he focused on fine-tuning his programs and immersed himself in them, determined to dedicate his performances at the World Figure Skating Championships this week, to the people who died. His performances should be worthy of their memory, he said.
The result was a pair of spectacular programs that brought Malinin his second consecutive world championship, which he won by 31 points, a colossal edge in a sport in which margins of victory are often measured in single digits, or even tenths.
The sold-out crowd at TD Garden in Boston on Saturday for the long program was on its feet long before his performance was done, and for good reasons: Malinin, from Vienna, Va., is a dynamic skater who is single-handedly lifting the sport into another stratosphere with his technical skills and his ability to connect with a new, younger audience.
He landed a breathtaking six quadruple jumps, including the quad axel, which requires a mind-boggling four-and-a-half rotations in the air. No one else in the world has done it. No one else has landed six quads in one program, either.
For years, the top skaters in the world could only dream of landing the quad axel, a jump made harder by its forward-facing entry. But Malinin, now a student at George Mason University, first landed it at an international event when he was 17.
He said landing those quads at worlds meant a lot to him because it was in front of a crowd in his home country, although he couldn’t hide his disappointment that he hadn’t landed the seven that he had hoped for.
As a teenager, Malinin — a hoodie and jeans kind of guy — started calling himself “Quad God” for his ability to execute quad jumps. But now his unique performances are just as memorable. With his flowing movements and unique body shapes, his routines could double as modern dances. The music he often chooses for them is the opposite of the long-used classical pieces the sport has been known for. He performs to music he likes to listen to, he said.
On Thursday, in his short program, he bounded onto the ice and performed to the song “Running” by the rapper NF. He sang along to it as if he were alone in his car.
For the long program on Saturday, he marched into the rink, taking each step with determination, as if heading for a street fight. His song was “I’m Not a Vampire (Revamped)” by the rock band Falling in Reverse, and his outfit matched the theme of the music. It was a blinged out version of what looked like Dracula’s tuxedo, and under the lights the array of silver, purple and red sequins and rhinestones on it made Malinin look sprinkled with glitter.
For the crowd at worlds, Malinin wasn’t just a skater, he was an entertainer. He moved masterfully, in synchronicity with the song’s every note, and he even shouted along with a few of the more aggressive vocals.
His thick, tousled blond hair became a golden blur as he shunned gravity and went airborne to perform jump after jump. Along with the conventional jumps, he included a move he calls the Raspberry Twist, which is a twisting version of a butterfly jump during which he is nearly parallel to the ice. He christened the move for his last name: In Russian, “malina” means raspberry. He also did a backflip, and the crowd erupted in a loud, sustained roar, dancing and clapping along as if it were at a rock concert.
Malinin logged 110.41 points in the short program, one of the highest short program scores ever at an international competition, beating Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama by 3.32 points.
After the short program, Kagiyama, the Olympic silver medalist at the 2022 Beijing Games, said he was in awe of Malinin’s transformation from a skater largely known for the strength, speed and timing required to land impeccable quads to one with artistry nearly as untouchable.
“I’m starting to think he’s invincible,” Kagiyama said.
Adam Rippon, a bronze medalist at the 2018 Olympics, said that Malinin’s athleticism, especially his quad jumps, tends to overshadow his natural talent as a performer, and that’s a shame.
“It’s really hard to be unafraid and expose your emotions like that, but I think he does that really well, and he does that unabashedly, almost to the point where he’s reckless,” Rippon said. “I think the quads are amazing, but what I really like about his skating is that he pushes himself to the absolute ends in his brilliant, brilliant programs.”
On paper, Malinin had virtually already won before Saturday’s free skate. Like Simone Biles in gymnastics, the base scores of his technical elements were so high that it would have been hard for anyone to surpass him. Malinin showed that at nationals in January, when he won by nearly 47 points. At worlds, Malinin scored 318.56 points overall, crushing second-place Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, who had 287.47 points. Adam Siao Him Fa of France was third, 40.37 points back.
“At his age and especially at his level of purity of technique and everything else he brings, not only do I think no one can beat him, but I don’t think that there’s a way to understand what his ceiling is,” Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist and television skating analyst, said of Malinin.
“What more could Ilia do?” Hamilton added. “Anything he wants. Nothing is impossible for a skater with that kind of natural talent.”
Malinin said his practices before worlds were easy. The jumps. The spins. The movements to the music. It all felt so right, he said.
Yet at the rink, there were times when he thought about the skaters who died, he admitted, forcing him to pause. His parents — Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skornyakov, who skated for Uzbekistan at past Olympics — coach him and helped him regroup, he said.
Those skaters he knew were not there anymore, gliding by or standing back, wide-eyed, to watch him and learn from him, or to train next to him, and that “really upsets me,” Malinin said. Honoring them through his performances has helped him move forward.
“I’m also really glad that I was able to get through this,” he said earlier this month, “and really just have this mind-set of, you know, skating for them now.”
