Figure Skaters At The 2026 Winter Olympics Are Pushing Th…

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In 2021, famed Russian figure skating coach Alexei Mishin said that no figure skater would ever be able to successfully perform a quad axel in his lifetime. The ing year, two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu was training to master the jump, but when he attempted it at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, he fell short of finishing the four-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Mishin’s pronouncement, it seemed, had been validated.

“I thought I would see a quintuple toe before I would see a quad axel,” says 2002 Olympic bronze medalist Timothy Goebel, known in his time as the “Quad King.” Goebel was the first skater to perform a quad salchow jump in competition all the way back in 1998, 10 years after Canadian Kurt Browning did the very first ratified quadruple twisting jump, the toe loop, at the world championships, marking the beginning of the quad era of men’s figure skating.

Over the subsequent decades, more skaters, Goebel, would come along and add more varieties of quads.(There are six main types of figure skating jumps, which are named after their creators and distinguished by their takeoffs, whether by blade, edge, or toe.) By 2016, all quads had been successfully completed in competition—for that one axel that Mishin, Goebel, and others thought they’d never see.

Then, in 2022, Ilia Malinin did it. The Virginian, who was just 17 years old at the time, had already been calling himself the “Quad God” online before that year’s US International Figure Skating Classic, but landing the quad axel cemented the title. The American phenom didn’t make the 2022 Olympic team, but in the past two seasons he has won the world title twice and is the overwhelming favorite for the men’s singles gold going into the 2026 Winter Olympics based on his technical abilities alone. All of this has left the skating world wondering what might be next for the jumping phenom, and for the sport in general.

The quint, a five-revolution jump, is the logical next step in this progression. Malinin, who has been called the “Simone Biles of figure skating,” hasn’t been coy about his desire to land one of these elements, reportedly going so far as to prepare for a quint attempt late last year during practice sessions. Recently, the Associated Press weighed in and declared that a quint cannot be done, stating “most sports scientists agree that the speed and amplitude necessary for five-revolution jumps is truly impossible,” though they didn’t quote any naysayers directly.

The quint, however, is not as impossible as the AP’s article would have you believe, and if anyone can pull it off, it’s Malinin, a generational talent who has already done generational-talent things. The quint will mark the culmination of decades of development in the sport, from the judging system to its training practices to even how the jumps themselves are defined.

“I do believe it’s possible,” Malinin told CBS Sunday Morning.

If you watch old figure skating programs, you might notice that, back in the day, they jumped differently. “When people would step up for a jump, [they would] have a massive delay, rotate on the way down, and have kind of an open position,” says Justin Dillon, chief high-performance officer of US Figure Skating. This technique created a very pleasing arc in the air; it had a floaty, ethereal quality.

“But that’s not efficient when we’re talking about these multi-rotational jumps, and that’s because now you have a limited amount of air time when you can actually reach your peak angular velocity and then maintain it,” says Lindsay Slater Hannigan, assistant professor of physical therapy at University of Illinois Chicago and sports sciences manager for US Figure Skating.

The heights that the top male athletes can jump are relatively similar across the board. Malinin and other elite male skaters get about 20 inches off the ground at the peak of their jump. The only thing left to manipulate is the speed of rotation. “What we’ve learned in the meantime is that what actually makes or breaks a jump is the ability to snap into that rotational position as quickly as possible,” Hannigan says, ”because that gives you longer to maintain that really high angular velocity.”

According to Hannigan’s analysis of the data, there’s no one better at that snap than Malinin. “His quad axel looks everyone else’s triple axel. And I say that meaning [the] angular velocities that he has to reach for his quad axels are the exact same and similar to what everyone else is reaching for [on] their triple axel,” she says.

“A lot of athletes were looking they needed to rotate 1,900 to 2,100 degrees per second. Ilia is still very comfortable at around 1,800 degrees per second for the quad axel, which is insane. It’s not slow, but it’s literally what you would expect for a triple axel or a quad toe,” she says. “He doesn’t need to reach his peak rotational velocity because he can get into that jump and maintain it for a lot longer, and then he gets a lot more rotation. It’s not what you would expect for this groundbreaking element that no one else has been able to accomplish.”

Unother skaters, Malinin hasn’t had to max out on his rotational velocity in order to complete the revolutions for the quad axel, because he can get into the twisting faster than anyone else. This perhaps leaves room to add a bit of rotation to the mix.

“For him the idea of doing a quint and taking it to the next level is very reasonable,” Hannigan says.

But first, a quick primer on what qualifies as a quint. “A true quint would be five rotations in the air,” says George Rossano, a physicist who also happens to be a figure skating judge. This seems a fairly obvious statement—unnecessary, even. Five is baked right into the name of the jump, just a quad means four, and so on and so forth.

But that isn’t how it plays out in practice. It is not uncommon for skaters to pre-rotate on the ice for the more difficult jumps quads. This means that most skaters aren’t doing all of the revolution work up in the air; they’re turning a bit on the ice before they take off, and the International Skating Union (ISU), the federation that makes the rules for the sport globally, usually lets it slide, even in cases of extreme pre-rotation. Then there are the under-rotations on landing, which are much more closely scrutinized and penalized. Still, a skater can be up to a quarter under-rotated and receive credit for the jump. “You could actually do a jump that’s four and a quarter in the air, and it would be called a quint by the ISU,” Rossano points out.

Malinin is hardly an egregious pre-rotater, and he’s often well rotated on his landings, too. “I have examples of Ilia where he’s fully rotated on the landing. So four and a quarter,” Rossano says of his observations of Malinin’s quad axel. (Rossano stresses that this is a personal observation, not one made in his capacity as a judge.) It is arguable that Malinin has done nearly as much up-in-the-air rotation that he’d need for a quint, according to the minimum standards of the ISU. A successful quint jump is as much about the rules that are used to define it as it is about physical prowess.

“I don’t think the quint really will require much more of him, because he can do a quad axel,” Dillon says.

Tom Zakrajsek, who has coached two-time world medalist Vincent Zhou, who has mastered several quad jumps, says that the moment he saw Malinin do the quad axel, he thought that the prodigy would be able to upgrade to a quint jump, particularly the salchow or the toe loop, the easiest jumps on the skating ladder of difficulty. Goebel stresses the use of the free leg on both the salchow and the axel as a potential overlap that would help Malinin move from quad axel to quint salchow.

“There’s a similar timing for when you’re pressing off the skating leg and moving the free leg up and through,” he explains. “The timing is similar; the kind of biomechanics are similar.”

But the axel technique is altogether more difficult—a completely forward takeoff, use of the knee rather than ankle, the instability of the takeoff edge. Goebel says the quad salchow was easier for him than the triple axel. That’s why Goebel, the first skater to land a quad salchow in competition in 1998, thought he would sooner see a skater do a quint salchow than a quad axel.

The current ISU rules incentivize neither jump. The base value (BV) of the quad axel, an exponential leap forward in jump difficulty, is only a point ahead of a quad lutz, the next most difficult jump, which several male skaters have mastered over the past decade. “Yes, [the quad axel] is significantly undervalued in terms of its intrinsic difficulty,” Rossano said in 2022. “But if you gave it its true, intrinsic difficulty, then the one person now who has a quad axel wins every time, even though he might mess up elsewhere in the program.”

Malinin has become dominant in men’s figure skating not on the basis of a single groundbreaking element but because he has complete mastery over the entire repertoire of quad jumps and does several—sometimes seven—in his programs. The points on those add up, especially when you factor in additional points for positive grades of execution, which can add up to five points to the base value of an element. (If a skill is done poorly, a skater can lose up to five points, so it’s certainly a double-edged sword.)

Until July 2024, quints didn’t even appear in the scale of values; they’re in there now, no doubt due to Malinin’s quad axel and his teasing of a quint, but all the jump types have been given the same value, even though some entries are plainly more difficult than others. Malinin’s incentive to someday do a quint is the same as it was for a quad axel—bragging rights, not points on the scoresheet.

It’s unly, though, that the ISU will need to enter a BV for a sextuple twisting jump into the table of values anytime ever. “The fastest I’ve seen anybody rotate, from the limited measurements I do, is about 6.5 [rotations] per second, maximum,” Rossano says. That’s about 390 rpm. But that assumes a consistent rotational speed throughout the whole jump, which is frankly impossible. All jumps—even Malinin’s—start slower, build to a peak, and then slow down to land safely.

“Let’s say that’s 90 percent [efficiency], which I think is achievable, so that the fastest average rotation speed you might get with a 90 percent efficiency is 5.85 rotations per second. And the highest I’ve ever seen Ilia jump, expressed in time, is about 5.82. So that says that the best you’re ever going to do is 4.8.” This is enough for a fully rotated quint jump, according to ISU definitions, but not a six-revolution jump, even if you accept some pre-rotation and a little under-rotation on the landing.

These technical bounds forward—not just the quad axel and the potential quint but also the past decade of quad development—would not be possible without improved training practices and off-ice conditioning and recovery protocols that have changed how athletes prepare. This is something that Dillon, Hannigan, and Goebel all stressed as being crucial to the development of quad jumps over the past decade and what has brought us to the precipice of a quint.

Goebel, who came of age during the explosion of quad jumps in the early aughts, described his cohort as the “experimental generation.” Lots of skaters could do complex jumps, but maintaining their health lagged behind their technical abilities. Many of his generation were pretty beat up and rarely made it through multiple Olympic cycles. Goebel might’ve been the Quad King, but his reign wasn’t as long as he would have wanted it to be.

“The off-ice training and conditioning and recovery protocols have evolved significantly since I was competing, and so the athletes are able to prepare off the ice much better and just maintain an injury-free body for much longer,” he says.

So for Malinin, the question remains if he’ll be able to do the quint inside a taxing long program with several other jumping passes, spins, and choreographic elements. It’s one thing to perform a groundbreaking element as a stand-alone; it’s quite another to do it inside a jam-packed program in a high-stakes competition. To pull off a quint in a competitive context would require consistency in training, endurance, and confidence.

It’s all well and good for one athlete to be able to pull off a remarkable feat, but for Malinin’s achievements to move the sport forward, they have to be replicable. Other skaters will eventually need to be able to do the jump that Malinin has already pioneered for his impact to be truly revolutionary.

“It will be replicable,” Hannigan says of the quad axel. The Virginian is undoubtedly a unique specimen, but others had attempted it before him, albeit unsuccessfully, and he’s already inspiring younger skaters to give it a try. Rio Nakata, a Welsh-Japanese junior skater, says that he studied Malinin’s quad axel closely from the stands of the Grand Prix Final. “Malinin makes it look easy, so just watching him I feel I might be able to do it,” he told Japanese outlet Sports Graphic Number.

But Nakata, the current world junior champion, as Malinin once was, still hasn’t figured it out. “Malinin jumps it almost straight up, a vertical jump, but my jump has more width, so I think if I figure out how to use that width better,” he said, “I might be able to land it.”

Put another way, once one person does a seemingly impossible jump, others feel it’s possible. Malinin has beaten a path to the quad axel that others can analyze. It was as much a feat of imagination as a technical one. Now skaters Nakata have a map to , even if they modify the route to suit their style. Malinin made what was a theoretical concept very real for the skating world. He can do the same for the quint.

“It would be a quantum leap for the sport,” Goebel said of the still theoretical quint jump. “It’s hard to even articulate how much of a generational step that would be.”

One of the remarkable things about Biles was that she not only impressed with what she could do but she made you imagine what else might be possible. She finished rotations so high above the mat that you imagined that she could throw an extra twist in, which she eventually did. The Simone Biles of figure skating exhibits a similar quality. His jumps are not just impressive in their own right; they hint at future possibilities. When you watch Malinin do a quad axel in Italy, imagine that extra half revolution, ’cause it’s surely coming.