The Quad God Performs Another Miracle

Figure skating is a fundamentally cruel sport. A full regular season or tournament structure gives top athletes a bulwark against variance. But a figure skater's biggest competition comes only every four years; over the course of a single year, they will, if they are fortunate, get six elite-level opportunities to prove what they can do. Factor in that program execution, especially for the quad-defined men's event, is inconsistent, and that skaters are fundamentally at the whims of a subjective judging panel, and the sport itself can start to feel like a cruel game of chance. Just take a glance at figure skating's visibly HTML-powered official scores site, and it's not difficult to find a men's free skate dogged by poor execution across the board. One mistake and, well, that's just unlucky. Wait for your next shot in a year or four.

So the absurdity of Ilia Malinin in this era of figure skating is not simply that he can perform elements that no one else can—a quad axel!—or string together a number of jumps that no one else can match—seven quads!—but that he is so technically gifted and so consistent that he appears immune to the terrible whims of chance that his competitors are subject to. The base difficulty of the programs is such that he doesn't need to nail every single one of his jumps to convincingly win over his next-closest competitors. Earlier this year, he squeezed seven quads into his World Championships free skate, though he didn't skate it clean, and he still won by 30 points. But, hey, why not nail it too?