Figure Skaters at the 2026 Winter Olympics Are Pushing the Limits of What’s Possible

In 2021, famed Russian figure skating coach Alexei Mishin said that no figure skater would ever be able to successfully perform a quad axel in his lifetime. The following year, two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu was training to master the jump, but when he attempted it at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, he fell short of finishing the four-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Mishin’s pronouncement, it seemed, had been validated.

“I thought I would see a quintuple toe before I would see a quad axel,” says 2002 Olympic bronze medalist Timothy Goebel, known in his time as the “Quad King.” Goebel was the first skater to perform a quad salchow jump in competition all the way back in 1998, 10 years after Canadian Kurt Browning did the very first ratified quadruple twisting jump, the toe loop, at the world championships, marking the beginning of the quad era of men’s figure skating.

Over the subsequent decades, more skaters, like Goebel, would come along and add more varieties of quads.(There are six main types of figure skating jumps, which are named after their creators and distinguished by their takeoffs, whether by blade, edge, or toe.) By 2016, all quads had been successfully completed in competition—save for that one axel that Mishin, Goebel, and others thought they’d never see.

Then, in 2022, Ilia Malinin did it. The Virginian, who was just 17 years old at the time, had already been calling himself the “Quad God” online before that year’s US International Figure Skating Classic, but landing the quad axel cemented the title. The American phenom didn’t make the 2022 Olympic team, but in the past two seasons he has won the world title twice and is the overwhelming favorite for the men’s singles gold going into the 2026 Winter Olympics based on his technical abilities alone. All of this has left the skating world wondering what might be next for the jumping phenom, and for the sport in general.

The quint, a five-revolution jump, is the logical next step in this progression. Malinin, who has been called the “Simone Biles of figure skating,” hasn’t been coy about his desire to land one of these elements, reportedly going so far as to prepare for a quint attempt late last year during practice sessions. Recently, the Associated Press weighed in and declared that a quint cannot be done, stating “most sports scientists agree that the speed and amplitude necessary for five-revolution jumps is truly impossible,” though they didn’t quote any naysayers directly.

The quint, however, is not as impossible as the AP’s article would have you believe, and if anyone can pull it off, it’s Malinin, a generational talent who has already done generational-talent things. The quint will mark the culmination of decades of development in the sport, from the judging system to its training practices to even how the jumps themselves are defined.

“I do believe it’s possible,” Malinin told CBS Sunday Morning.

If you watch old figure skating programs, you might notice that, back in the day, they jumped differently. “When people would step up for a jump, [they would] have a massive delay, rotate on the way down, and have kind of an open position,” says Justin Dillon, chief high-performance officer of US Figure Skating. This technique created a very pleasing arc in the air; it had a floaty, ethereal quality.

“But that’s not efficient when we’re talking about these multi-rotational jumps, and that’s because now you have a limited amount of air time when you can actually reach your peak angular velocity and then maintain it,” says Lindsay Slater Hannigan, assistant professor of physical therapy at University of Illinois Chicago and sports sciences manager for US Figure Skating.

The heights that the top male athletes can jump are relatively similar across the board. Malinin and other elite male skaters get about 20 inches off the ground at the peak of their jump. The only thing left to manipulate is the speed of rotation. “What we’ve learned in the meantime is that what actually makes or breaks a jump is the ability to snap into that rotational position as quickly as possible,” Hannigan says, ”because that gives you longer to maintain that really high angular velocity.”