The Ilia Malinin dilemma: Are tricks trumping artistry at the Winter Olympics?
| Milan and Livigno, Italy
On Tuesday, Ilia Malinin and his perfect hair will attempt a figure skating routine that could well be confused for a Marvel movie.
With the U.S. skater鈥檚 quadruple-rotation leaps, contorted spins, and the combustion of a full back flip, spectators will need only a tub of popcorn to believe they have slipped into a summer blockbuster.
This has been the way of figure skating since chronic judging scandals made the sport swap the inscrutabilities of artistry for the relative precision of athleticism. Every Olympics is a new frontier in the race for more points. Who can crowbar the most high-scoring elements into a routine to push their competitors into numerical submission?
Why We Wrote This
A thirst for bigger and better tricks drives the competition at Olympic freestyle skiing, snowboarding, and skating events. But some athletes want to preserve artistry amid the quest for 鈥渇aster, higher, stronger鈥� maneuvers.
Artistry? Just wave your arms a bit and call it good.
That鈥檚 an overstatement, but Mr. Malinin鈥檚 routine is so unfathomably full of high-scoring elements that he doesn鈥檛 even need to skate it particularly well to win. (As happened in the team event on Sunday, when the United States took home the gold.)
Is this how it should be? The Olympics, after all, are for sports, and the new scoring system is encouraging quantum leaps in athletic achievement. But the question echoes beyond figure skating. In freestyle skiing and snowboarding, too, does the thirst for the next big trick sap some of the Games鈥� joy? Or is it the very heart of the Olympics 鈥� 鈥渇aster, higher, stronger鈥�?
Curiously, freestyle skiing and snowboarding have approached this question in almost exactly the opposite way from figure skating.
Creativity, not points, powers freestyle sports
From the moment snowboarding entered the Olympics in 1998, the athletes put down a marker. They wanted the sport, even at the Olympic level, to be an expression of creativity and freedom. As a practical matter, that meant insisting on multiple runs with the winner being the one completing the best single run, not a combination of multiple runs.
That allows skiers and snowboarders to try things and make mistakes on one run without a bobble being necessarily fatal to their chances of winning. And try things, they do.
In U.S. freestyle skier Alex Hall鈥檚 gold medal slopestyle run in Beijing in 2022, he made one of his jumps off a mound of snow that everyone else ignored. It wasn鈥檛 even intended as an element of the course. But his spontaneity brought a creative flair. On the final jump, he launched a right double-cork 1080 pretzel, which involved stopping the trick midair and reversing the direction of spin.
鈥淚 love variety, so I love doing events with weird jumps and weird takeoffs,鈥� he said during a news conference at this year鈥檚 Games.
That spirit of adventure is deeply sewn into the sport. Mr. Hall is famous to his 200,000 Instagram followers for driving his van between events so he can stop and ski cities. Yes, the cities themselves. He can at times spend hours a day scouring Google Earth for stairs and railings and concrete walls .
鈥淵ou look at it as a canvas that鈥檚 not meant to be skied on, and it frees you to do that differently,鈥� he said at a media event in October.
Other skiers and snowboarders head into the backcountry, where the terrain offers seemingly endless interpretations. 鈥淚t鈥檚 good for me to have that other thing we can put our mind to and bring that inspiration back to our sport,鈥� said American Colby Stevenson, a big-air silver medalist in Beijing who missed out on the Milan Cortina team. 鈥淵ou work with the terrain. How is the mountain telling you how to do the jumps?鈥�
For many of these athletes, developing a new trick is a progression. Nick Goepper, a slopestyle skier turned halfpipe skier at Milan Cortina, trains on the jumps he built at his 鈥淩ollerblade Ranch鈥� in the Utah desert. That includes an airbag he imported from Canada and classified as a gift so he 鈥渨ouldn鈥檛 get in trouble with customs,鈥� he said with a laugh at the October media event.
Fellow halfpipe skier Alex Ferreira describes his process as a 鈥渇ive-step program鈥� that starts with ideation. After developing a trick in his head, he tests it out on the trampoline, then by rollerblading into a foam pit, and then tries the trick with an airbag before finally bringing it to snow.
鈥淪ome steps can take two days. Some steps can take two years. And I鈥檝e been stuck in all different types of steps,鈥� Mr. Ferreira said in October. 鈥淒efinitely a lot of trial and error.鈥�
The airbags, or 鈥渧ert鈥� bags, have become essential for learning today鈥檚 tricks 鈥� but not without some controversy.
鈥淲hen the tricks get so advanced and require such advanced facilities to perform them, I think it shrinks the pool of potential participants on the development level,鈥� Mr. Goepper said last fall.
Drawbacks of pushing the limits
Stevenson agreed that pushing tricks too far can have negative consequences. 鈥淲e are at a turning point,鈥� he said at the October media event. 鈥淭he youth have always been pushing the limits, but they鈥檙e almost maxing out, especially with the size of the jumps.鈥�
鈥淥ur sport isn鈥檛 just about doing the next biggest spin,鈥� he added. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the creativity side of it.鈥�
Jason Brown has been saying this about figure skating for years. Twice an Olympian (2014 and 2022) and twice an alternate (2018 and this year), he says that skaters need to take a stand for artistry.
鈥淲hen it comes to the singles event, I want to prove to the next generation and the skating fan and the skating community that quality and integrity and the artistic side of the sport matters,鈥� he said at the October media event.
That means giving more points to the elements that are not jumps, from spins to footwork. The top-scoring jump, for example, can get 12.5 points. The top spins max out at four points.
鈥淚t sends the message to athletes: I don鈥檛 really need to work on my spins that much because of the points,鈥� Mr. Brown said.
The challenge figure skating faces is the murky legacy of artistic scores. In the famously opaque 6.0 scoring system, it was common knowledge that judges would pump up artistry scores for skaters they liked. Artistry is still an element of the new scoring system, but significantly diminished.
That makes winning largely a matter of mathematics 鈥� exactly what snowboarding and freestyle skiing wanted to avoid. Then again, the scoring in figure skating is vastly more scrutinized than in snowboarding and freestyle skiing.
In the end, Mr. Malinin does not think it needs to be an either/or debate.
鈥淚 always tell people that figure skating is an extension of your personality, and everyone should have that in their skating,鈥� he said at a pre-Games news conference. 鈥淭hat is what can make skating so beautiful and intimate.
鈥淔or those people who enjoy doing backflips and skating to different music, it is something everyone can bring in their own personality,鈥� he added.
And besides, this tension has existed for decades. The Winter Games have always been an alchemical combination of 鈥渃rash, bang, pow鈥� and ineffable grace. The question of whether big tricks are taking over is simply a part of a sport鈥檚 evolution.
鈥淚t鈥檚 almost like saying, you no longer like your hometown, because people just keep moving into it. [But] there鈥檚 not a lot you can do to stop it,鈥� said Mr. Goepper, the freestyle skier, at the October media event. 鈥淚t鈥檚 sort of like: Beat them. If you can鈥檛 beat them, join them.鈥�
Associated Press
