Oh my quadg0d: Ilia Malinin crushes the Skate Canada field - and even tops himself

Ilia Malinin and his father-coach, Roman Skorniakov, celebrate at Skate Canada.

 There comes a point in the careers of some extraordinary athletes when they are competing against only themselves and the record books.

And, ipso facto, given that the athlete has to be extraordinary to face such a challenge, he or she finds it harder and harder to top past achievements.

At his best (or near it), two-time reigning world champion Ilia Malinin of the U.S. now is in that position at age 20, competing only against himself in men’s singles figure skating.

That should be clear from his winning margin over runner-up Aleksandr Selevko of Estonia in the Skate Canada Grand Prix that ended Sunday in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Yes, the field wasn’t packed; none of Malinin’s would-be rivals for Olympic gold this February in Milan were entered in this third event of the six-event Grand Prix Series.

But Malinin did not settle merely for winning or winning by a bunch.  With a record-breaking free skate score (breaking his own mark), he won by a humongous 76.60 points.

It was by far the largest winning margin in any discipline of a significant international skating competition in the 22 seasons since the framework of the current scoring and judging system was put into place.

Malinin topped the field by 16+ points more than the previous biggest runaway, 60.21 points by Spain’s Javier Fernandez at the 2016 European Championships.

(Thanks to skating scores.com for that statistic.)

It was Malinin’s 12th straight win in individual competitions and his second on this year’s Grand Prix circuit, earning him a spot in December’s Grand Prix Final.

With six clean quadruple jumps, Malinin racked up 228.97 points in the free skate, topping his 227.79 from the 2024 World Championships, when he had been the first to land six clean quads in a program.

(Skatingscores.com)

And he did it with a slightly imperfect skate, getting one level below the max on both his step sequence and one spin.  Skating to music with his own spoken words as a brief voiceover, he delighted the crowd with a backflip and pleased the judges enough to get 9.0 or higher on 19 of the 27 component scores.

“It almost felt like I was on autopilot,” Malinin told the media.  “It wasn’t perfect.  There’s always more to add to the program.  Hopefully that record can be even higher.”

His total score, 333.81, was both a personal best and just a whisker behind Olympic champion Nathan Chen’s record 335.30 from the 2019 Grand Prix Final. Malin had won Saturday’s short program by a modest (but decisive) 12.77.

Sunday, Malinin wanted most to land a quadruple loop, the quad he had least attempted.  He did that with aplomb, getting three grades of plus-4 and the other six of plus-3 for his execution of the jump.  It was his fourth successful quad loop in six career tries.

He did five of the six types of quad, omitting the Axel, with which he had made history in 2022 as the first (and still only) person ever to land one cleanly in competition.  Malinin has suggested he would like to attempt every type of quad in the Olympics.

Jumps count heavily in the current scoring system, and Malinin’s quad arsenal gives him a substantial advantage over everyone else in the base value of his free skate.  For instance: Malinin’s free skate BV was more than 30 points higher than Selevko’s.

What furthers that advantage is his consistency in landing them: he has fallen just four times on his 114 quad attempts since the start of the 2023-24 season, as both individual jumps and the opening jumps of combinations.

Eighty-eight of the 114 have received positive GOE, and some of the negatives could have come from the second jump in the combination;  skating scoresheets do not indicate if that was the case.

He began as the self-styled “quadg0d,” but that minor bit of teenage hubris now seems an understatement.