Silver this. Silver that. That’s the colour linked perennially and always to Yuma Kagiyama’s name. But that pile of shiny metal bits doesn’t come close to explaining what the world saw in the men’s free skate at the world figure skating championships in Prague on March 28. Kagiyama’s free skate was epic. Homeric. Classy. The […]
Ilia Malinin
Men Meet Friday the 13th
Friday the Thirteenth. That’s all you need to know. The men’s Olympic final was on this day of black cats, and blood moons, and things that go bump in the night. Unfortunately, so many of the men went bump in the night. But nobody, just nobody, even into the far corners of this earth, imagined […]
Jason Brown: Art Lights the Way
Jason Brown grew up feeling the magic of the Miracle on Ice, that unforgettable march of the US hockey team to win gold at the 1980 Olympics. in Lake Placid, N.Y. Never mind that the event pre-dated his birth by 14 years. It’s just something that lives forever in the heart of an athlete in […]
Malinin: Crazy Good
How do you defeat this guy, this Ilia Malinin kid – still only 20 – who seems to have been hatched from another planet and dropped earthward? Malinin and his mop of tawny hair and an unearthly ability to rotate his body, won his second consecutive world figure skating championship title on Saturday at the […]
Malinin in Pursuit of Art
He calls himself Quad God but he wants to be –and needs to be – much more. Ilia Malinin, this maharajah of mad floaty magic, will lay all of it on display at the US Figure Skating Championships this week, feeling “very Shakespearean,” he says. “In my opinion, skating is an art, and everyone has […]
Ilia Malinin: A Win for the Ages
MONTREAL There was a moment in his free skate on a snowy night in Montreal when Ilia Malinin knew, despite everything weighing on his mind over the past couple of weeks, that “it was my time.” Time for him to deliver an explosive routine the likes few had ever seen. Time to put illness, and […]
Men’s Short Program
MONTREAL Earlier this season, two-time defending men’s champion Shoma Uno despaired on how he could ever possibly defeat the crazily talented quad-at-demand Ilia Malinin, possibly ever again. Malinin is not only the guy who landed the first quad Axel in history, but his jumping abilities seem limitless. In the weeks before the world championships, someone […]