(Photo credit score: Amber Searls-Imagn Images)
Ilia Malinin has three-peated.
The 21-year-old U.S. determine skater received his third straight world championship Saturday in Prague, scoring 329.40 factors to win gold by a margin of twenty-two.73 over Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama. Shun Sato additionally secured Japan a bronze medal.
Malinin turns into the primary skater to win three consecutive world titles since Nathan Chen did it from 2018-2021. The 21-year-old can also be the youngest to win three championships since Russia’s Alexei Yagudin in 2000, and he is the second-youngest American to say three after Dick Button did it on the age of 20.
Malinin’s triumph additionally serves as a redemption arc after being the gold-medal favourite within the Milan Olympics final month and ending eighth. He landed 5 quads within the free skate as a part of a routine that featured a decrease diploma of soar problem in comparison with his Olympic efficiency. Malinin additionally declined to aim his trademark quad axel.
‘My expectation was to go away the lengthy program in a single piece, and I positively assume that occurred,’ he mentioned after the victory.
When requested if he deliberately selected a safer routine, Malinin responded: ‘A greater reply to that query is, this has been time for me to chill out and benefit from the final competitors of the season.’
Malinin additionally loved a return to his profitable kind after his 14-competition win streak, the longest stretch in males’s skating in many years, stalled out in Milan.
‘This was in all probability one of many simpler world championships I’ve been to, simply due to the quantity (of) stress I had on the Olympics. And going into right here, I felt prefer it was virtually no stress in any respect,’ he mentioned. ‘I utterly blocked out all of the expectations, all of the stress that individuals placed on me and was actually right here to skate for myself and luxuriate in each second of those world championships, and I feel I did precisely that.’
Malinin’s success on the planet championship may imply he is destined for additional redemption on the subsequent Winter Olympics. Every U.S. males’s singles skater who’s received three-plus world titles has additionally received an Olympic gold, together with Button (1948, ’52), Hayes Alan Jenkins (1956), David Jenkins (1960), Scott Hamilton (1984) and Chen (2022).
The French tandem of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron received the gold medal within the ice dance competitors.
They posted a 230.81 rating to simply win over Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, who took silver in 211.52. The American couple of Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik received bronze with a rating of 209.20.
The world title is a record-tying sixth for Cizeron with the opposite 5 coming when Gabriella Papadakis was his companion. Cizeron and Papadakis additionally received gold in ice dancing on the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Cizeron took a break after these Olympics and previously retired in December 2024 however rapidly had the itch to compete once more. Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry teamed up in March 2025 and the latter used to compete for Canada.
The chemistry got here collectively rapidly and the 31-year-old Cizeron and the 33-year-old Fournier Beaudry received the ice dance gold medal on the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics final month.
And now they put collectively a memorable efficiency on the world stage.
‘I feel that having left the stage for a short while, you know the way treasured these moments are,’ Cizeron mentioned after Saturday’s victory. ‘These are moments that I notably like, the second when you could have simply completed and you may simply take this psychological picture that goes by so rapidly.’
–Field Level Media