I've seen a lot of talk surrounding the figure skater Ilia Malinin in the most recent Olympic games as well as a lot of misconceptions, so I figured I'd share a basic timeline of events surrounding him (while trying to remain as fair and balanced as possible). Featuring: videos for illustration reasons.
1976 - At this point, the most rotations anyone has ever done in a competition is a triple axel (three and a half). Wanting to advance the athleticism of the sport, a skater and his coach, Terry Kubicka and Evy Skotfold, developed a new move, the figure skating backflip, and debuted it at the Olympics.
1977 - The International Skating Union bans backflips in competitions just one year after their debut. They cite safety concerns and claim they go against the spirit of the sport because they violate the principle of always landing on one blade. They remain popular in non-competitive showcases like the Ice Capades in the coming decades.
1988 - Kurt Browning lands the first quadruple jump in a competition. A quad axel (four and a half) is theorized to be mechanically impossible for a human to achieve without a ramp. Quads remain rare in competitions for the time being.
1998 - Surya Bonaly gets injured the day before her planned final skating competition before retiring: the 1998 Olympics free skate. Knowing she wasn’t going to win a medal anyway, she preformed an illegal backflip, intentionally landing on only one foot, therefore adhering to what the ISU considered the spirit of the sport while still knowingly getting no points. She did this both to give people “something to talk about” and to protest the way she had been unfairly discriminated against and disrespected as a black skater in an overwhelmingly white sport.
2002 - There is a cheating scandal where a Russian mobster strikes a deal with French judges so they will hand the win over to Russia instead of Canada, the favorites to win, in the pairs figure skating competition. After this is uncovered, the scoring system is changed in an attempt to make it more objective than subjective in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Now, instead of giving an overall technical score for the performance combined with an artistic score, judges score each move individually, with a base value that each move is worth based on its difficulty, which is then combined with the artistic score. This pushes people to chase the more technically difficult moves worth more points, often at the expense of artistry.
2010 - Evgeni Plushenko of Russia loses Olympic gold to Evan Lysacek of the USA, despite Plushenko’s program including a difficult quadruple toe loop/triple toe loop combo, while Lysacek’s program did not include any quads. This leads to much public controversy, causing the ISU to change the point values to more heavily favor quads. The so-called “quad revolution,” is pushed into full-swing, wherein it becomes difficult if not impossible to place in the highest level competitions without at least one quad included in a skater’s program, with two or more often being needed. Many skaters start chasing them above all else, often letting artistic expression fall to the wayside.
2022 - At 17 years old, Ilia Malinin, already the self-styled “Quadg0d,” becomes the first person to land a quad axel in competition, and remains the only person to do so to this day. Later this year, he scores multiple top-3 medals in high-level competitions with his program, despite him being not very smooth or artistic, solely based on technical grounds.
2024 - Adam Siao Him Fa goes viral for his backflips in competitions, especially in the World Figure Skating Championships. Due to his popularity, the ISU finally unbans backflips after nearly 50 years of having them be illegal, along with many other somersaulting moves. However, they don’t have a specific point value attached to them like quads do, and are graded as a generic choreographic element. In the Grand Prix Final competition, Malinin shows off his newly-legal backflip and also decides to make every one of his seven allowed jumping passes a quad, which is virtually unheard of because of their difficulty. He takes second place, despite under-rotating all of his quads to some degree and falling on one of them.
2026 - Malinin preforms first Olympic backflips since they were unbanned, including one where he lands on one foot. Malinin gets second in round four of the team figure skating event, losing to rival Yuga Kagiyama of Japan, but defeats Japan's Shun Sato in round ten, earning the USA team enough points to win gold and knocking Japan in silver. The final point total from the ten combined events is 69 to 68.
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