It’s Completely Insane, Worth No Points and Has the Olympics Flipping Out

It’s Completely Insane, Worth No Points and Has the Olympics Flipping Out

The most spectacular backflip at this Winter Olympics is happening on ice, not snow. And it’s the highlight of American figure skater Ilia Malinin’s program.

By Louise Radnofsky and Ben Cohen, WSJ

Feb. 10, 2026

The backflip has become the electrifying coda of Ilia Malinin’s programs Kyodonews/ZUMA Press

MILAN—Every time American figure skater Ilia Malinin takes the ice, he dazzles fans with his repeated feats of antigravity.

Then, once he’s done melting their brains with a dizzying array of quadruple jumps, the man who calls himself the “quad god” busts out one last flourish.

And he does it just because he can.

It doesn’t earn him any technical points. It puts his whole body at catastrophic risk. For nearly a half-century, it was also banned from the sport. But now this one act of pure showmanship has become the electrifying coda of Malinin’s programs as he stakes his claim as the greatest figure skater of all time.

He backflips. On ice. With a pair of knives strapped to his feet. And he sticks the landing.

What makes the act of flinging himself upside down so audacious is that it’s entirely gratuitous. Unlike his quad axel or even a spin, the backflip doesn’t do anything directly for his score.

Not since Usain Bolt thumped his chest before crossing the finish line of the 100-meter dash have the Olympics seen such a brazen and ostentatious flex.

For years, Malinin has pushed the limits of his sport on his way to becoming a world champion and Olympic gold medalist. The first and only person ever to land a quad axel in competition, he took all of the four-rotation jumps that revolutionized figure skating and made them routine. They helped Malinin rack up so many points that he became almost impossible to beat.

But as he clinched Olympic team gold for the Americans here, it wasn’t his outrageous jumps that drew the loudest gasps from the crowd.

The real highlight was when he went head over heels.

In a choreographic sequence during the final seconds of his program, Malinin peacocked to the fans—and judges—with the kind of daring maneuver that’s more common on snow than ice.

Figure skating has a long, complicated relationship with backflips, which were ruled illegal almost immediately after someone did one at the 1976 Games. In 2024, the sport’s governing body finally yielded to pressure to approve the controversial move. It decided that skaters would no longer be penalized for a backflip—but they wouldn’t be particularly rewarded for one either.

Even though he didn’t have any real incentive to attempt such a risky move, Malinin was quickly airborne.

At first, even he felt a momentary pang of caution. “What if something happens?” he thought. What happened instead is that he began training the backflip with two ropes tied around his waist. After all, this virtuoso who has flirted with the boundaries of figure skating at every turn couldn’t possibly resist a trick this flashy.

“I think I can find a way to make it really cool,” he promised in 2024, shortly before he unveiled a backflip, “and kind of scare the audience.”

Since then, it has left audiences stupefied.

The nuances of figure skating’s six jumps elude most casual viewers who tune in during the Olympics, so they might not appreciate the full extent of Malinin’s unprecedented athleticism. He’s the only person who has landed every type of quad—and he once did them all in a single four-minute stretch. He also rotates so fast through the air that it’s difficult for the untrained eye to perceive that he’s twisted four times, rather than three.

But anyone can see that his backflip is amazing. First it makes them blink. Then it makes them shriek.

For years, Malinin has pushed the limits of his sport on his way to becoming a world champion and Olympic gold medalist.