EVERETT, Washington – Ilia Malinin’s final movement put him on his knees. The music stopped, and Malinin held the position for some 15 seconds, his forever childlike face blank, his pale eyes fixed in the distance, his cheeks reddened by the emotional and physical effort of his short program at Saatva Skate America.
The stillness was his way of continuing the mood of the program, set to music that is a lamentation composed by Welshman Karl Jenkins to remember the 116 children and 28 adults killed in a 1966 mine disaster in Wales. It is a tone that the 21-year-old Malinin rarely has tried to express in a competitive skating program.
It underscored another point Malinin was making: as he began the four years leading to the next Winter Olympics, he was no longer constrained by acting the part of the hyperconfident super hero known as the Quadg0d, the skater who favored up-tempo, powerful music and program themes.
That version of Malinin had been the overwhelming favorite to win the men’s singles Olympic gold medal last February in Italy, but he unraveled under both external and internal pressure in the free skate and dropped from first to eighth.
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“It will forever be known as the worst day of my life,” Malinin said last week.
It was, he said, also the day he realized he loved skating, loved the intrinsic joy of being able to jump and spin on ice with full mastery of his body. From then on, he realized, it would be more about showing such emotions than on collecting medals and records, which included a third straight world title last season.
“I want to forget about the Olympics,” he said Friday.
He won the short program at Angel of the Winds Arena despite a messy quad Lutz-double toe combination that left him with a score under 100 points (96.74) for just the fourth time in 21 competitions dating back three seasons. He takes a 5.45-point lead over Japan’s Sota Yamamoto into Saturday night’s free skate (9:30 ET, Peacock).
And yet the performance still seemed special to Malinin.
“I felt a lot different skating out there,” he said. “I feel a lot more connected to the audience, the music, the program.”
In the time he spent away from the ice during the off-season, he worked on letting the past become history. He changed his management teams. He changed his perspective.
“I was trying to let go of the part of me that was worried about what people would say or the expectations of people,” he said. “Just letting a more vulnerable, more natural behavior for me (come out).”
His mother, Olympian Tatiana Malinina, had wanted him for years to skate to a “slow or very classical piece.” The one he chose, a section of Jenkins “Cantata Memoria,” includes the mournful pleading a violin against the agonized voices of a chorus and soloist.
Staying frozen in his final position was a way of amplifying its power.
“It was just kind of connecting back to the program,” he said.
He began the 2 minute, 50-second program by pushing off almost delicately from a still position, his arms reaching forward, his gaze moving upward. That atmosphere of tranquility continued until he sped up for his first jump, a flawless quadruple flip, and he recreated the evocative beginning it with his last of seven elements, a spin.
“The way I approached this season was trying to have the hardest programs in the world,” Malinin said before Skate America.
“I think they are definitely a step up into a much bigger evolution of my skating.”
There will still be plenty of quadruple jumps. He rolled out a quad toe-quad toe combination in practice Thursday.
“The new season is really about experimenting,” he said.
It was a big one for him to interpret a program that confronted tragedy. He is making it work.
Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at the last 13 Winter Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCSports.com.
