Ilia Malinin three-peats at Skate America, joins exclusive club

ALLEN, Texas — Ilia Malinin became the fourth man to win three consecutive Skate America titles, prevailing despite a flawed free skate in his first top-level competition since winning his first world title.

Malinin, a 19-year-old from Virginia, landed six quadruple jumps (two negatively graded, doubling a seventh attempt) between two programs Saturday and Sunday to prevail by 7.24 points over Frenchman Kévin Aymoz. Aymoz won the free skate.

“It was a pretty challenging moment for me, just stepping on the ice I felt way more nervous than usual,” Malinin said on NBC Sports. “That might have played a part in the whole program.”

Aymoz, 27, had an unforgettable emotional reaction to his personal-best free skate. Aymoz, who was fourth at the 2023 Worlds, had his 2023-24 season end prematurely with a 31st-place finish in the European Championships short program in January.

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Malinin became the fourth man to three-peat as Skate America champion after Scott Hamilton (1979-82), Todd Eldredge (1994-97) and Nathan Chen (2017-20).

As expected, Malinin did not try a quad Axel here. Like last season, he may not debut it until December’s Grand Prix Final, where stakes are higher with all of the top men gathering in a possible preview of worlds.

He is the only man to land a quad Axel in competition and has done it clean eight times since he first performed it two years ago at age 17, according to Skatingscores.com.

In Sunday’s free skate, he performed a backflip, a move that was illegal for 48 years until the International Skating Union reversed course over the offseason.

Malinin planned four quads in his free skate. After doubling a planned quad loop in the first half, he changed his program on the fly and swapped a planned triple Salchow-triple Axel combination to a quad Salchow-triple Axel. He also spun out of a triple Lutz landing, putting both hands on the ice.

He has talked about trying to become the first man to land a quintuple jump in competition and has teased a new jumping combination to come, declining yet to reveal specifics.

Malinin competes again next week at Skate Canada. The field also includes 2023 World silver medalist Cha Jun-Hwan of South Korea, plus American Jason Brown, who was fifth at the last two worlds.

Then comes December’s Grand Prix Final, should Malinin be among the top six men over the course of this six-week Grand Prix Series.

There, Malinin could face Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, the 2022 Olympic silver medalist who was the only man within 49 points of him at last March’s worlds.

Wakaba Higuchi won the Skate America women’s event, while Ilia Malinin leads for the men.