Ilia Malinin took the moment in winning the world skating championships on Saturday

Two months ago, after easily won his third national American figure skating title, Ilia Malinin showed up on his track to train for the world championships, but was unable to skate even for a second.

Malinin, the favorite of the overwhelming gold medal for the Olympics of next year in Italy, had tied his skates, had looked around and felt a void that stopped him.

That week, 28 people involved in skating had died when an army helicopter collision with a passenger jet on the Potomac river, killing everything 67 passengers. Among them were young skaters, including three of the Washington Figure Skating Club, Malinin’s Club and others who would sometimes use the track in Reston, Virginia, where he trains.

A coach, a skater and his father and an entire family – two young sisters and their parents – died from that club and Malinin, who is 20 years old, was so broken in the following weeks that he could not even bear to say their names, he said.

“Skating usually helps me to manage difficult things in my life, but it was too exciting to be there,” Malinin said in an interview with the New York Times the first week of March. “I tried to spend a production day of skating. But I couldn’t take the mind in another place. I couldn’t.”

When he returned to the track several days later, he said, he doubled his efforts to be the best skater of men’s singles in the world, one directed to celebrities to the Olympics for about 10 months.

He said he focused on the development of his programs and immersed himself in them, determined to dedicate his performances to the world skating championships this week to the people who died. His performances should be worthy of their memory, he said.

The results were two spectacular programs that brought him his second consecutive world championship, which he won for 31 points, a colossal edge in a sport in which the margins of victory are often measured in individual figures or even tenths.

The crowded crowd at the TD Garden in Boston was standing long before his program was finished, and for good reasons: Malinin, a student of the George Mason University of Vienna, in Virginia, is a dynamic skater that is lifting alone sport in another stratosphere with his technical skills and his ability to connect with a younger audience.

It has obtained a breathtaking six quadruple jump, including quad axel, which requires a four and a half rotation in the air. No one else in the world did it. No one else got six quads in a program.

For years, the best skaters in the world could only dream of landing the Quadxel, a leap made more difficult by its entry forward. But Malinin landed him for the first time to an international event when he was 17 years old.

As a teenager, Malinin – a type of hooded sweatshirt and jeans – began to be called “quad god” for its ability to perform quad jumps. But now its unique performances are equally memorable: with its flowing movements and unique body shapes, its routines could double like modern dances. The music that often chooses for them is the opposite of the long -used classic pieces for which sport has been known. He performs with the music he likes to listen to, he said.

Thursday, in his short program, he limited himself to ice and was performed to the song “Running” by the Rapper NF. He sang with it as if he were only in his car.

For Saturday’s long program, he marched on the track, taking every step with determination, as if he headed towards a street fight. His song was “I’m not a vampire (renewed)” by the rock band that fell on the contrary, and his dress corresponded to the theme: it was a bling -tout version of the dracula tuxedo, and under the lights the series of silver, purple and red sequins made it seemed sprinkled with glitter.

For the crowd, he was not just a skater, he was an entertainer. He could hear the emotion as he moved masterfully, in synchronicity with every note of the song, and he even shouted together with some of the most aggressive voices. His thick and scrutidated blonde hair became a golden blur while avoiding gravity and went in flight to perform leap after the jump. Together with the conventional jumps, Malinin has included a move that calls the touch of raspberry, which is a twisting version of a butterfly jump during which it is almost parallel to the ice. He copied the move for his surname: in Russo, “Malina” means Raspberry. He also made a backflip and the crowd broke out in a strong and sustained roar.

Malinin recorded 110.41 points in the short program, one of the highest scores of the program ever in an international competition, beating Yuma Kagiyama in Japan of 3.32 points.

After the short program, Kagiyama, the Olympic silver medal at the 2022 Beijing Games, said she was amazed by Malinin’s transformation by a skier in large part known for the strength, speed and times necessary to land the impeccable quadriceps to one with almost equally untouchable art.

“I’m starting to think it is invincible,” said Kagiyama.

Adam Rippon, bronze medal at the 2018 Olympics, said that Malinin’s athleticism, in particular his quad jumps, tends to overshadow his natural talent as an artist, and is a shame.

“It is really difficult not to be frightened and expose your emotions in that way, but I think it does it really well, and it does it in a shameless way, almost to the point where it is reckless,” said Rippon. “I think the quads are fantastic, but what I like very much about his skating is that he pushes himself for absolute purposes in his brilliant and brilliant programs.”

On paper, Malinin had practically already won before Saturday’s free skating. Like Simone Biles in gymnastics, the basic scores of its technical elements were so high that it would have been difficult for anyone to overcome it. Malinin showed that in Nationals in January, when he won for almost 47 points. At Worlds, Malinin scored 318.56 points in total, crushing second place Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, who had 287.47 points. Adam Siao he makes of France was third, 40.37 points ago.

“At his age and above all to his level of purity of the technique and everything else he brings, not only I think nobody can beat him, but I don’t think there is a way to understand what his ceiling is,” said Scott Hamilton, an Olympic gold medal of 1984 and television skating analyst from Malinin.

“What could do more ilia?” Hamilton added. “Everything he wants. Nothing is impossible for a skater with that type of natural talent.”

Malinin said his practices before the worlds were easy. Jumps. The laps. Movements to music. Everything seemed so right, he said.

Yet on the track, there were times when he thought of the skaters who died, admitted, forcing him to pause. Her parents – Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skornyakov, who skied for Uzbekistan at the Olympics of the past – train him and helped him to group, said.

Those skaters he knew were no longer there, slipped or standing backwards, with the eyes wide open, to look at him and learn from him, or to train next to him, and that “really upsets me,” Malinin said. Honor them through his performances helped him to go on.

“I am also really happy to have been able to overcome this,” he said, “and I really have only this mentality of, you know, skate for them now.”