Ilia MalininLooking for an Olympian figure skating gold may not be so easy after all. It’s the same with his American team.
Yuma Kagiyama landed a pair of quads, one combined with a triple toe, earning the Japanese star 108.67 points for her short program on Saturday night. Malinin dominated the segment — she was second with 98.00 — and gave her team 33 points, just one behind the US champion midway through the three-day event.
As he waited for his score, his teammates on Team USA rallied behind him, waving and covering him with American flags.
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“I was excited to be here. Well, this is the Olympics. You’re talking about this as if it’s a bad thing,” said Malinin, who is undefeated in her last 14 events spanning two years.
“It’s great to be here and be a part of this team,” Malinin said. “It’s honestly a lifetime achievement.”
Italy was third in the team event with 28 points, Canada fourth with 27 and Georgia fifth with 25.
Only the top five advanced after the short program, and the Canadians squeaked by thanks to Stephen Gogolev’s best score of 92.99. Kevin Aymoz was unable to match France, leaving his team one point below the cut-off line.
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The second half of the team event began Saturday night with the free dance, where world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates returned to the USA. rhythmic dance on Friday, hours before the opening ceremony, giving the Americans a maximum of 10 points and plenty of encouragement to start the multi-disciplinary event.
Now, it is the Japanese who have the momentum.
“I didn’t feel pressure and I didn’t feel nervous today,” Kagiyama said. “I’m very happy that our score is so close to the US.”
Before making her Olympic debut, Malinin strolled through the tunnels inside Milan’s Ice Skating Arena wearing a black tank top that read “Quad God,” a nickname that reflects the way she performs those otherworldly quadruple jumps.
The name came about when he tried to change his Instagram handle.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I landed a quad? Quad God, there it is, okay, let’s put it in.'” he told CBS News in an interview last week. “And from there everyone says, ‘Why did you call yourself the Quad God? You only have one Quad.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, now that I think about it, maybe I should try to land them all for Quad God status.'”
The 21-year-old rider didn’t attempt a quad axel — the same 4 1/2-turn jump has only been landed in competition — but did a shaky version of the triple. She started with a great opening quad flip and ended her program with a quad lutz-triple toe loop, earning bonus points for the combination because it came in the second half of the program.
But when his score was read, Malinin was almost stunned that Kagiyama had won, and by a margin.
“That’s only 50% of my full potential here,” Malinin said.
Malina, whose parents were Olympic skaters from Uzbekistan and whose grandfather was a skater from the USSR, began skating at the age of 6.
She won gold at the 2024 and 2025 ISU World Figure Skating Championships.
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Kagiyama opened with a quadruple toe combination, landed a quad salchow and ended her short program with an incredible triple axel. And unlike Malinin, when Kagiyama’s score was read, he jumped out of his seat with his fists raised.
“I always get good motivation from Ilia, because she is one of the skaters who created this moment in figure skating,” said Kagiyama. “He’s a good jumper, and he can do quads, so I always think I want to catch him.”
The Americans have been on a mission since the 2022 Beijing Games, where they extinguished their Olympic victory. Russian doping controversy. The ensuing investigation kept the gold medals in limbo for more than two years, until Chock and Bates were finally part of the team that received them at the ceremony at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Japan has long been considered their biggest rival. And they lived up to those expectations, taking the short programs of Kaori Sakamoto and world champion pairs Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara to en route to victory in Kagiyama on Saturday night.