Winter Olympics 2026: Ilia Malinin backflips into lead in men’s short program

MILAN — It’s reckless and exhilarating, daring and unnecessary, thrilling and chaotic all at once. The mid-routine backflip is one of skating’s most controversial moves, and Ilia Malinin — for the third time this Olympic Games — broke it out during his short program on Tuesday night, to absolute mayhem at the Assago Ice Skating Arena.

The flip doesn’t add to his technical score, but it sure does rally the crowd. Malinin earned a 108.16 on the night to lead the field heading into Friday’s medal round. Yuma Kagiyama, who bested Malinin in the team short program skate, ended the day second with 103.07, and France’s Adam Siao Him Fa currently ranks third with a score of 102.55.

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The evening was a marked improvement over his short program in the team event, when Malinin looked ill at ease and, by his standards, rocky. After Tuesday night’s skate, he admitted that he had indeed been feeling what he called “Olympic pressure.”

“Going out there the first time hitting that Olympic ice and feeling the atmosphere, it was like, I didn’t expect it to be so much,” Malinin said. “It took me a little while to understand what really happened, but now that I understand it, I took a different approach today.”

Malinin backed off of doing a planned quad axel, which would have been the first such jump in Olympic history. But he stuck with his traditional backflip, and as expected, the move improved his routine from the exceptional to the sublime. And he knew exactly what he was doing as. he did it.

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“Having that attention, all those eyes on you — that pressure shows you who you truly are on the ice,” Malinin said. “It’s one thing to do everything in practice, but it’s another skill to be able to perform it under pressure. That’s something I really enjoy.”

The backflip’s appeal as performance art is obvious. The necessary elite-level athletic ability, combined with the sheer lunatic danger of flipping upside down while ice skating, is guaranteed to send an already-hyped crowd into a frenzy. Malinin is a leading individual gold medal threat and one of the greatest skaters on the planet because he combines showmanship, athleticism and fearlessness, and the backflip is his ultimate manifestation.

The legacy of the backflip is one of brief flourishes followed by blanket shutdowns. Terry Kubicka, an American skater and the first to land a triple lutz, performed the first Olympic backflip at the Winter Games in 1976, landing on both feet. The International Skating Union was apparently so horrified by the move — and aghast that Kubicka landed on two skates — that it immediately banned it from any skating performance.

Twenty-two years later, Surya Bonaly, a three-time French Olympian, landed a one-skate backflip at the Nagano Olympics in 1998 as a protest against what she deemed unfair judging practices. Bonaly had been backflipping for years; she may be the first female ever to land the backflip, and at age 12 she set a Guinness record for the youngest female to backflip.

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Banned in ISU-sanctioned events like the Olympics, backflipping remained a mainstay on the performance and professional circuit, where daring skaters like Scott Hamilton would throw themselves skates-over-head to the delight of crowds.

Until last year, the International Skating Union would deduct points from any skater who attempted one. In 2024, though, as part of its ongoing attempts to shed the sport’s stodgier image, the ISU permitted backflips.

But there’s a catch: they don’t go to a skater’s technical score, but to their components score, which includes artistic presentation. In other words, you don’t get any extra points for landing a backflip, but you can get a small bump for the sheer artfulness of the effort. That distinction makes it a high-risk, low-reward endeavor for most skaters. Most, but not all.

Malinin has been backflipping for several years, but was only able to begin using it legally in competition starting in 2024. Every time he unleashes one, the crowd erupts. And on Sunday night, as part of his gold medal-winning performance, he threw in a backflip … and then saw none other than Novak Djokovic cheering him.

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“He was standing there, hands on his head,” Malinin said afterward, his gold medal around his neck. “I was like, Oh, my God, you know,?’ That’s incredible. That’s like a once-in-a-lifetime moment, just seeing a famous tennis player watching my performance. I’m absolutely blown away.”

Fair enough. Malinin’s been blowing away the skating world with his backflips for the last year; about time someone did the same to him.

The men’s event continues on Friday night with the free skate program, where the top 24 scorers from Tuesday’s short program will face off with the podium at stake. Malinin will be leading the field … and he might just flip over it, too. The technical scores and the ambition in Malinin’s program are so high that he would seem to be a gold medal favorite, but he’s trying to avoid falling into that trap of assumption.

“Being the favorite is one thing, but actually getting it done, and doing it under pressure, and really just having the skate of your life to earn that medal is another thing,” Malinin said. “I don’t want to get too ahead of myself and say that, you know, it’s guaranteed that I’m getting that gold medal … I still have to put in that work for that long program, so I’m not going to take that for granted.”