The “Quad God” did not come to the Winter Olympic Games to take part — he came to take over.
And after already winning a gold medal for Team USA as their ace to pull them over the line against Japan, he will enter Friday’s free skate segment of the men’s individual competition looking to secure double gold in Milan.
Malinin is currently leading the pack after a nearly flawless short program, and will now be going to his strength of the free skate to look and make history on Friday.
While the back-to-back world champion and three-year undefeated skater could take it easy and still win the competition, that is not Malinin’s style.
He is performing dangerous backflips in his routines, even though they don’t earn him any points with the judges.
His mantra coming in was that he wanted to change how casual fans viewed figure skating, and his final performance at the Olympic Games might be his magnum opus.
As currently scheduled, Malinin will be attempting the most difficult figure skating routine in the century-plus history of the Games.
More news: Olympic Backflip Sparks Outrage Over ‘First’ Label Given to Ilia Malinin
More news: Snoop Dogg Speechless Watching Ilia Malinin Figure Skate at the Olympics
The planned layout includes a quad flip, quad axel, quad lutz, quad loop, a quad lutz–Euler–triple flip combination, a quad toe loop–triple toe loop combination, and finally, if he needed any more points, a quad salchow–triple axel sequence.
No Olympian in history has landed a quadruple axel jump in competition, and Malinin is actively practicing it on Thursday in the ramp-up to the finale tomorrow.
If he goes for all seven quads, it would also break any sort of Olympic record and would set him up for a chance to crush world record scores.
Malinin will skate last, so he will know what he needs to beat to secure that special crown. He might not need to chance it by attempting the quad axel at all to win the gold.
But that’s not how the “Quad God” acts.
He’s always trying to push the boundaries of figure skating, and, need or not, Malinin is aiming to make more history on Friday.
Read the full article here
