Before Ilia Malinin, the quadruple axel was somewhat of a myth. It requires the skater to vault into the air facing forward and complete four and a half revolutions before landing backward. Quads are hard enough. The quad axel adds another half revolution to the jump. It has a base value one point higher than the next most difficult move and is considered so dangerous that few skaters dare to even try it. To land it clean, those four and a half turns need to be done in less than a second. Blink and you’ll miss it. Malinin did it in 2022 at just 17 years old. When American figure skater and Olympian Adam Rippon watched Malinin pull it off for the first time, he called it “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do on the ice.”

Since then the 21-year-old Virginia native has landed it 15 more times in competition. He’s still the only skater to have ever pulled it off.

“At first my parents and people thought I was crazy when I wanted to land that quad axel,” Malinin tells me. “They didn’t think I would be able to do it. People would say, ‘I don’t think I’ll see a quad axel in my lifetime.’ ”

“It’s almost not human to be able to do that technically,” says fashion designer Vera Wang, herself a former competitive figure skater and avocational historian of the sport. “No one in the world can do that at the present time. And he seems to have mastered it from the first time he landed it in competition.”

It’s been about three years since Malinin first caught global attention by stepping onto the ice at an international competition in Lake Placid, New York, wreathed in royal blue, and landing the history-making jump. Now he’s the top-ranked figure skater in the world, a double world champion, and a gold medal favorite for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. On Sunday, U.S. Figure Skating announced one of its strongest Team USAs yet—a 16-athlete squad headlined by Malinin.

“Ilia has revolutionized the way we look at what is physically possible in our sport,” says Johnny Weir, the former US figure skating champion turned star NBC commentator. “He makes the most challenging technical feats look simple. He’s one of those special skaters that you know was born to do this. He’s a once-in-a-generation talent.” Malinin still looks like a boy, with fair skin and rosy cheeks, as if he’s always just left the brisk air of a skating rink.

In person, he downplays his accomplishments with an easy charm—an endearing attribute for a man so young and so decorated. He’s still in college, taking classes online at George Mason University when he’s not training for the Olympics. At home he enjoys simple pleasures: gaming, sleeping, and time with his two cats, Mysti and Miu Miu. “Off the ice he is demure and shy and very humble, but he has an inner confidence that makes him magnetic,” says Weir. “He’s like everyone’s cool little brother. On the ice, he is a force.” But when asked during his VF photo shoot what music he prefers, he’s bashful. “You won’t like it,” he tells the room. “It’s a lot.” His protests are overcome, and we spend the next 30 minutes listening to Japanese kawaii metal band Babymetal. Unexpected music choices loom large in Malinin’s work. His programs, set to scores from hit shows like Euphoria and Succession, have gone viral. He hasn’t seen Succession but fell in love with Nicholas Britell’s celebrated theme when it was pitched by his choreographer. Skating to that song, he says, helped launch him to fame on social media.

Malinin’s parents, Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, both gifted skaters who competed in the Olympics for Uzbekistan, discouraged him from toddling onto the ice as a boy. “I was always at the rink anyway. They had no other place to bring me.” By the age of six, he was demanding to get out on the ice. By 11, he had won his first national juvenile championship.

Perhaps due to his tender age and the steep incline of his ascent, Malinin says he only recently realized that figure skating would be his life’s work. “I didn’t expect that I would be really at the top until a few years ago,” he says. It may have been in 2022, in the run-up to the Olympics, when he put up a masterful performance and finished second at the US Figure Skating Championships. In a twist of fate he still regrets, he wasn’t selected for Team USA to compete in Beijing.

He sees a silver lining now: “If it wasn’t for that decision, I don’t think I would achieve or reach where I am right now. I think I would be closer to being done with skating, honestly. But I feel like now it’s just the beginning.”

Beyond technical ability, figure skaters “have to maintain a certain level of artistry,” Wang tells me. Early in his career, Malinin fell short on the latter. “He was just this wild kid that could do these jumps, that other than Nathan Chen, nobody has ever been able to do.” That included landing a mind-blowing “five or six quads in four minutes.” (He made history with seven at Japan’s Grand Prix Final in December.) He quickly mastered style. At 21, “he’s invented a new art form for skating,” says Wang. “Ilia was just the athlete. And now he’s become an artist.”

With the Olympics rapidly approaching, Malinin is wary of making promises. Does he want to land a quintuple, the next frontier in his own figure skating space race, with a staggering five rotations? He’s landed a few in practice but demurs when asked if he wants to bring the unthinkable leap into competition. “Maybe,” he says. “Most likely. But as we’re in the middle of the season, that’s not really on my mind right now.”

Something he does want to talk about: reviving the golden era of figure skating. “Trying to make the sport big again is something that I’m really pushing,” he says. “Remember, a few decades ago, it was huge. It was across every TV channel.”

Over the years, a drought of star power fueled the decline in attention paid to figure skating, which saw its peak at the 1994 Winter Olympics, when a record 126 million viewers tuned in to watch the women’s figure skating short program. “You need stars to propel sports,” Wang explains. She thinks Malinin is brilliant enough to carry the mantle. “He is the right guy at the right time. Not only for America but also for skating. Unfiltered, cool, boyish, a kind of daredevil.”

Malinin has thought deeply about why the sport no longer permeates pop culture like it used to. “Trying to find a way to be more versatile with how you project it and ways you can push the sport more to hit news headlines,” he says. He points to breaking records, something he’s very familiar with. “It can just be a person who’s not a fan of sports, but they see this skater broke the world record for the most amount of points, and they’re going to be interested to click on it.”

Figure skating, with its marriage of eye-watering athleticism and aesthetics, is prime for the short-form video era. “That is the beauty of skating,” Malinin says. “You have your athletic side, where you need to do all of these hard jumps or really difficult spins or tricks or slides. But also you have the artistic side, where you have to come up with a story behind your performances or make everything look beautiful.”

Malinin’s fans agree that this cocktail of power and beauty has been key to his success. “He is a spectacular technician, like Simone Biles, doing things nobody else can do,” says Weir. “Artistically, he is unique and can create a mood and experience in his own way that nobody can replicate.”

“What you get from Ilia is pure energy, pure youth, pure technical ability and invention,” says Wang. “It’s a whole new vocabulary in how to choreograph a program, the speed you’re moving these jumps at, the devil-may-care abandon.”

Malinin’s Instagram, where he goes by the handle @quadg0d—chosen, he admits, long before he had earned it—has nearly 300,000 followers. “People kept saying, ‘Why’d you do this? There’s other people landing so many more quads than you.’ I was like, Hmm. I wonder if I can try to land all of them? So that’s where that journey of landing every single quad started.”

Online, Malinin posts videos of his interviews, photo shoots where he dons Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu (the brand, not the cat), and gravity-defying jumps. “He’s creating a popular culture around skating again,” says Wang. In one clip that has been watched more than 6.5 million times, Malinin, wearing jeans and a hoodie from the rapper NF, vaults off the ice into a backflip. The move, which was only recently made legal in some competitions, helped him break the free-skate record and earn gold at the Grand Prix Skate Canada International in November. If it looks effortless, it’s because it apparently is. “For me, now, a backflip on skates is as simple as a single jump,” Malinin says, twirling his floppy blond hair. He insists the momentum of being on skates helps. “It’s not such a scary trick.”

Malinin, having won his last 13 competitions, is very likely the best figure skater in the world. His competition freely admits it. “If we both perform at 100 percent of our ability, I don’t think that I will be able to win,” Yuma Kagiyama, a Japanese figure skater who won silver at the last Olympics, said in 2024.

“I would say my biggest competitor is myself,” Malinin says, flashing some rare immodesty he’ll quickly try to rein in. “That’s always the thing that I’ve always stuck with no matter what level I was at. I always did not worry about everyone else and how they skated. Of course, it was part of it. Will I have enough to beat them? How well do I need to skate to beat them?”

I ask if the expectations placed upon him now, this boyish 21-year-old expected to win gold at the Olympics while on leave from college, freak him out.

He shrugs. “Not necessarily. I’m already in my zone.”

​​Grooming, Anita Bahramy; tailor, Laura Hanna. For details, go to VF.com/credits.