"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."
A longstanding belief held that the quad axel was impossible, reinforced when Yuzuru Hanyu failed to complete it at the 2022 Winter Games. Quad jumps evolved over decades, beginning with Kurt Browning's ratified quad toe loop and later Timothy Goebel's historic quad salchow in 1998. By 2016 every quadruple had been landed in competition except the axel. In 2022 Ilia Malinin, then 17, successfully landed the quad axel, earning a reputation as a technical prodigy. Malinin subsequently won two world titles and entered the 2026 Olympic cycle as the overwhelming favorite based on his technical skill.
Read at WIRED
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