Two months ago, after easily winning the US third national title of figure skating, Ilia Marinin appeared on the rink and trained for the World Championships, but was unable to skate for a second.
A favourite for the overwhelming gold medal at the Olympics in Italy next year, Marinin skated, looked around, and felt the emptiness that stopped him.
That week, 28 people involved in the skate died when a military helicopter collided with the passenger seat across the Potomac River, killing all 67 passengers. Among them were young skaters, including three others from the Washington Figure Skating Club and the Marinin club, who used the links that used the Reston, Virginia.
He said the coach, the skater and his father, as well as the whole family (two young sisters and their parents) had passed away from the club, and the 20-year-old Marinin had been so broken in the weeks that he couldn't even say their names.
“Skating usually helps me handle the difficult things that are happening in my life, but I was just too emotional to be there,” Marinin said in an interview with the New York Times in the first week of March. “I tried to have a productive day of skating. But I just couldn't take my heart elsewhere. I just couldn't.”
When he returned to the rink a few days later, he said he doubled his efforts to become the best men's singles skater in the world tied to stardom at the Winter Olympics nearly ten months from now.
He said he was focused on tweaking his program, immersed himself in them, and decided to devote his performance to this week's World Figure Skating Championships. His performance should be worthy of their memory, he said.
The result was a pair of epic programs that brought Marinin to his second consecutive world championships. He scored 31 points.
The sold-out crowd at TD Garden in Boston on Saturday was standing up long before his performance was completed. And from Vienna, Virginia, Marinin is a dynamic skater who has on his own lifting the sport into another stratosphere with his technical skills and the ability to connect with a new young audience.
He landed a breathtaking six times the jump, including a quad accelerator that requires 4.5 half rotations in the air. No one else in the world does that. No one else has landed six quads in one program.
For years, the world's top skaters have only dreamed of landing a quad axel. However, Marinin, now a student at George Mason University, first landed it at an international event at the age of 17.
He said that landing those quads in the world meant a great deal to him as it was before the crowds of his home country, but he couldn't hide his disappointment that he didn't land the seven he wanted.
As a teenager, Marinin (a man like Parker and Jeans) began calling himself the “quad god” because of his ability to perform quad jumps. But now his unique performance is just as memorable. With his flow movements and unique body shape, his routine can double as modern dance. The music he often chooses for them is the opposite of the long-standing classic works in which sports are known. He plays to music that he likes to listen, he said.
On Thursday, in his short program, he was tied to ice and rapper NF performed on the “Running” song. He sang to it as if he were alone in his car.
Due to Saturday's long program, he advanced to the rink and took each step, as if he were heading for a street fight. His song was “I'm Not A Vampire (Revamped),” in which the rock band fell on the other side, and his outfit coincided with the theme of the music. It was a sparkly version of what looked like a Dracula tuxedo, with an arrangement of silver, purple, red sequins and rhinestones appearing to sprinkle marinin with glitter under the light.
For the world crowd, Marinin was not just a skater, he was an entertainer. He moved brilliantly in sync with every note in the song, and he even cried out along with some more aggressive vocals.
He shunned gravity and went into the air to do a jump after the jump. In addition to traditional jumps, he included a movement called a raspberry twist. This is a twisted version of the butterfly jump that is almost parallel to the ice. He baptized the movement for his last name: in Russian, “Marina” means raspberries. He also did a backflip, with the crowd erupting with loud, persistent roars, dancing and applauding like a rock concert.
Marinin scored 110.41 points in the short program. This is one of the best short program scores ever in international competition, beating Japan's kagiyama 3.32 points.
After a short programme, Kagiyama, Olympic silver medalist at the 2022 Beijing Games, said he is in awe of Marinin's transformation from skaters.
“I think he's invincible,” Kagiyama said.
Adam Rippon, a bronze medalist at the 2018 Olympics, said that Marinin's athletic abilities, particularly his quad jumps, tend to overshadow natural talent as a performer, which is a shame.
“It's really hard to expose your feelings like that without fear, but I think he's doing it really well. “I think Quads are amazing, but what I really like about his skating is that he pushes himself to the absolute end of his amazing, great program.”
On paper, Marinin effectively already won before Saturday's free skate. Like Simone Biles in gymnastics, his technical elements had a very high base score that made it difficult for everyone to surpass him. Marinin showed he won nearly 47 points at the Nationals in January. Worldwide, Marinin crushed Kazakhstan's second-placed Mikhailshaidorov, who scored 318.56 points overall and scored 287.47 points. France's Adam Ciao was third in the lead, 40.37 points ahead.
“At his age, especially at the purity of the technique and every other level he brings, I don't think anyone can beat him, but I don't think there's a way to understand what his ceiling is.”
“What more can Ilia do?” Hamilton added. “Whatever he wants. There's nothing impossible for a skater with such a natural talent.”
Marinin said his practice before the world was simple. Jump. spin. Movement towards music. It all felt very right, he said.
However, the Rink once thought about the skater who died and admitted that he would force a pause. His parents – Tatiana Malinina and Roma Skolnyakov, who skated for Uzbekistan at past Olympics, coached him and helped him reorganize, he said.
The skater he knew was no longer there, so he would look at him, slid and peer, to learn from him, or to train him next to him. Celebrating them through his performance helped him move forward.
“I'm also so happy I managed to get through this,” he said earlier this month.
