A First in Figure Skating

By Xan Hopkins '24, September 28, 2022

IC professor reacts to the first successful quadruple axel in the history of skating.

lia Malinin competing in the free skate at the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships.

(Photo by: Chris Allen/Shutterstock)

The quadruple axel is notorious in the figure skating community for being seemingly unachievable. Or at least it was before September 14, 2022, when 17-year-old American Ilia Malinin successfully completed the jump during the U.S. Classic in Lake Placid, New York.

Deborah King, professor of physics and graduate chair of exercise science and athletic training at Ithaca College, has spent her career studying the physics behind figure skating. As IC News reported over the winter, she had hoped that the moment would have occurred during the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. However, Japanese skater Yuzuru Hanyu made a widely publicized, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt.

That wasn’t the case in Lake Placid.

“Malinin’s jump went so smoothly that it was, like, ‘holy smokes,’” she said. “It’s amazing that he made it look that easy, as compared to watching [Hanyu’s attempt] in the Olympics when it was close, but not quite there.”

While Malinin’s accomplishment did not occur during a time when the entire world would be watching, King said that may have worked to his advantage.

“I think he purposefully did it at a small competition so that there was less pressure — he had been doing it consistently in practice,” she said.

King pointed out a few key aspects of Malinin’s jump that made him successful, including his rapid rotation speed and the impressive height of his jump, adding that she was curious to slow the clip down and calculate the exact airtime.

“Was it noticeably higher than other jumps we’ve seen?” she posited. “Most recorded airtimes don’t get any higher than about 0.7 seconds, but was he closer to 0.8 seconds?”

“I think we’d be hard pressed to see someone do anything more than a quad in axels, or a quince in other jumps, because there are limits to how high people can jump.”

Deborah King, professor of physics and graduate chair of exercise science and athletic training

Other factors behind the success included Malinin landing with his foot nicely aligned with the ice and not over-rotating at the takeoff.

“Sometimes you see people rotate on the ice before they jump so that they don’t have to rotate as much in the air,” King pointed out.

With the quad axel barrier passed, what’s next? Can we go even further, and if so, how far?

“I think we’d be hard pressed to see someone do anything more than a quad in axels, or a quince in other jumps, because there are limits to how high people can jump,” King said. “The only part that hasn’t really been investigated is whether skaters can get off the ice with more rotational momentum. I’m sure they can, but will it work in a combination? It’s difficult to measure.”

Regardless, King says Malinin has opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for figure skaters everywhere, and she is excited to see more skaters implement the quad axel into combinations, perhaps even attempting two of them in succession, now that it is known to be possible.

“It will be interesting to see, especially since this is so early in the season, what we see out of skaters that have been trying quad axels,” she said.