Königssprung for the first time: super-teen writes figure skating history

Junior World Champion Ilia Malinin wrote figure skating history with the first clean quadruple axel in a competition.

Königssprung for the first time: super-teen writes figure skating history

Junior World Champion Ilia Malinin wrote figure skating history with the first clean quadruple axel in a competition. The American managed the world premiere of the spectacular jump with four and a half turns at a competition in Lake Placid.

Having jumped into the history book of figure skating with four and a half turns, Ilia Malinin immediately reminded of his idol and role model Yuzuru Hanyu. "He definitely inspired me to try it in competition for the first time," said the US runner with Russian roots after his spectacular world premiere at a small competition in Lake Placid, the Olympic city of 1932 and 1980. It always feels easy in training but keeping your nerve in the competition was the big challenge.

And yet: The 17-year-old also took away the hope of his mentor from Japan, who retired from competitive sport in July, with the clean four-fold axel, of at least being the first in a show program with the king's jump. The ex-world champion had tried in vain several times, most recently at the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February. Malinin had planned to show this jump since March. "I've been working on the technology and trying to keep improving it," the Washington Post quotes him as saying. A project that he has now perfectly brought to the ice.

Malinin would have liked to go on the ice at the Olympic Games in Beijing. But the exceptional talent was only nominated by the US federation in the Olympic winter for the junior world championships, which he won, and the seniors, in which he finished ninth. After that, Malinin began to work seriously on the new challenge. And now rewarded himself for his courage with a record that nobody can take from him. Only within the family is the teenage jumper still number two. Mother Tatjana Malinina was eighth for Uzbekistan in Nagano in 1998, and fourth at the World Championships a year later in Helsinki. But of course without quadruple Axel ...

Malinin's compatriot Dick Button presented the first double Axel at the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. 30 years later, the Canadian Vern Taylor stood the king's vault in the triple version for the first time at the World Championships in Ottawa.