Ilya Malinin: Teenage phenom makes figure skating history and wins Grand Prix Final

CNN
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The phenomenon of American teenagers Ilya Malinin He won his first ISU Grand Prix Figure Skating Final on Saturday, after clinching his Make more Snowboarding The date is Thursday.

The 19-year-old became the first person to land a quadruple axel, widely considered the toughest jump in the sport, during a short program, while competing in a… Top Figure Skating Events in Beijing, China.

During the free skate, he then fell while trying to land the quad axel again, but shrugged off the mistake to score a career-best score of 207.76 and win the title.

“It’s an incredible feeling for me,” Malinin said afterward, according to Olympics.com.

He finished the race with a total of 314.66 points, another personal best, ahead of Japan’s Ono Shoma, the defending champion, who scored 297.34 points.

Malinin, whose Instagram account “quadg0d” refers to his history-making exploits, had already made the jump during a free skate at last year’s competitions, but the stakes are higher in the short program as there is a smaller margin for error with fewer elements in the short program. pattern.

“I’m really happy that I was able to achieve this,” Malinin told reporters after the short program on Thursday, according to Reuters. “Since it was my first time trying it in the short term, it was a lot of pressure for me.”

Malinin remains the only person to complete a quadruple axel jump in competition, a feat he accomplished for the first time at the US International Figure Skating Championships last year, and Malinin has removed the impressive jump from his programs this year.

He told Olympics.com on Tuesday that for him, the “base value,” or the basic level of points a jump is worth, “is not where it should be,” leading him to choose the lowest-risk trio in the competition.

Even some of the sport’s most decorated stars couldn’t land a quadruple because it required four-and-a-half turns in the air, switching from a forward-facing take-off to a rear-facing landing. For 44 years, the jump was locked at triple level.

But Malinin changed all that, completing the extremely difficult jump with gravity-defying ease.