The “god of four” bounced back from his Olympic nightmare with a third straight world figure skating title.
PRAGUE 1, Czechia — Ilia Malinin returned to the top podium.
Six weeks after a skating disaster knocked the Olympic gold medal favorite off the podium, the “quad god” performed big jump after big jump, and a backflip to boot, to defend his world title for the third year in a row.
Malinin screamed and punched the air in relief after completing a skate that showed he had achieved his wish to “move on” from the Olympics after days of torment by his mistake.
He praised the support of the audience, saying: “It was really challenging, really difficult but with you guys I got through it.” The goal, he added, is simply to get through the free skate “in one piece.”
Skating last after leading the short program, as he did in Milan, Malinin landed five high-scoring quadruple jumps but did not land his pioneering quad axel jump, a jump he did not attempt at the Olympics.
Malinin scored 218.11 in the free skate for a total of 329.40, well ahead of silver medalist Yuma Kagiyama of Japan with 306.67. Another Japanese skater, Shun Sato, was third with 288.54.
Kagiyama beat his personal best free skate score but still had to settle for the fourth world championship silver medal of a career that includes four Olympic silver medals and a total of five world medals, but no gold from either event. He still hugs Malinin after skating and they jump together to celebrate.
In the top-level figure skating show, there was no podium for France’s Adam Siao Him Fa, who was second after the short program but dropped to fifth overall after a fall. Estonia’s Aleksandr Selevko also dropped from third to sixth.
Malinin did not have a rematch with Mikhail Shaidorov, the Kazakh skater who won an Olympic gold medal, because he chose not to compete again this season.
This is a relatively common occurrence in figure skating for gold medal winners facing an onslaught of media and commercial opportunities after four years of grueling Olympic preparation.
Malinin became the first skater to win three consecutive men’s world titles since fellow American Nathan Chen, who achieved the feat in 2018, 2019 and 2021 after the 2020 event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The final competition of the championships was the free dance portion of the ice dance event on Saturday night. France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron took the lead after Friday’s rhythm dance.
Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.