Making World Championships put Andrew Torgashev ahead of his skating game plan

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Making World Championships put Andrew Torgashev ahead of his skating game plan

The season wasn’t supposed to go this way for Andrew Torgashev.

Torgashev came into it hoping only to remind everyone he was not done competing after two straight seasons lost to a lingering foot injury, to show that a one-time phenom who had won the U.S. junior title eight years ago at age 13 could get back in the mix with the top American men.

“I was planning to get back to training after nationals and come back to competition with more quads next season in hopes to make the world team,” he said.

His coach, Rafael Arutunian, had the same plan.

Both were duly surprised when Torgashev won the free skate at the U.S. Championships, finished third overall behind Ilia Malinin and Jason Brown, and was provisionally named with them to the U.S. team for next week’s world championships in Saitama, Japan.

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Ilia Malinin’s first U.S. figure skating title came with rare ambition - and struggles

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Ilia Malinin’s first U.S. figure skating title came with rare ambition - and struggles

SAN JOSE, California – Ilia Malinin clearly will have mixed emotions when he remembers winning his first U.S. figure skating title.

That was apparent from his reaction after finishing Sunday’s free skate.

The 18-year-old with limitless potential and seemingly limitless confidence had been rattled by his worst free skate of the season.

He shook his head sadly. Then he shook it again.

“Of course, this wasn’t the skate I wanted, but there’s always ups and downs, and you just after get over it and move on,” Malinin said.

He planned the hardest technical program anyone ever had attempted, with six quadruple jumps and two challenging combinations in the second half of the four-minute program. And he gamely kept trying to execute it, even after significant mistakes that would leave him second to surprising Andrew Torgashev in the free skate.

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Ilia Malinin heralds new era at figure skating nationals, but Jason Brown still has a place

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Ilia Malinin heralds new era at figure skating nationals, but Jason Brown still has a place

SAN JOSE, California — Ilia Malinin figures people thought of him as a just another guy a year ago when he made his senior debut at the U.S. Championships with two dazzling performances to finish second.

“I felt like nobody knew me until after nationals,” Malinin said. “It was almost like this random guy showed up and surprised everyone.”

That anonymity was long gone when Malinin took the ice Friday for his short program at the 2023 Nationals. By then, everyone in the skating world was focused on the 18-year-old who uses “quadg0d” as his social media handle in a disarming way, the young man who had made skating history earlier this season by becoming the first to land a quadruple Axel, a jump he plans to attempt again in Sunday’s free skate,

“It’s a big leap from last year,” Malinin said. “There was a huge spotlight on me. Everyone has expectations of me.”

And he exceeded them, leaving the son of two Uzbek Olympic figure skaters to face the question, “Has the Ilia Malinin era now arrived?”

“I think it is here, and it will be here for a long time,” Malinin said.

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As Ilia Malinin ponders quintuple jump, figure skating may face an urgent matter

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As Ilia Malinin ponders quintuple jump, figure skating may face an urgent matter

SAN JOSE, California – The subject of a five-revolution jump was sure to come up, now that Ilia Malinin has become the first person to land a fully rotated quadruple Axel, which has four and one-half revolutions in the air.

And, in Malinin’s case, to land it cleanly not only once but three times this fall, the most recent with stunning command at December’s Grand Prix Final.

Rafael Arutunian, who coaches Malinin intermittently, said via telephone that he and the skater talked about a quintuple when they were working together in California during the high school senior’s recent holiday break.

“I was basically saying a five-revolution toe loop can be done,” Arutunian said. “He agreed and was smiling.”

“It is definitely in the back of my mind right now,” Malinin, 18, said in media conference call last week. “It’s very hard to think of it at this moment because it’s still pretty much the middle of the middle of the season. I think after the season I’ll think about it, and maybe we will see one.”

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Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

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Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

ore difficult since last August.

“About tenfold more difficult,” he said.

For the previous six years, when he lived and trained in Colorado Springs, Pulkinen had a five-minute drive to a rink where the elite figure skaters had almost unlimited ice time. He had finished high school online and then had taken in-person and online college courses at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs essentially on his own schedule. .

When I spoke to him early last week, that life seemed a distant memory. Now he is up at the crack of dawn to get from Columbia University’s Manhattan campus to the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink, where he begins his daily training between 8 and 8:30, and the ice time available to him ends at 11:20. That trip involves 14 stops on the 7th Avenue subway and then a mile-long walk to the rink, and it takes between 50 and 55 minutes.

When his training ends, Pulkinen does the trip in reverse to begin his day as a sophomore at the Ivy League university.

“The mental oscillation between getting through a long program and then rushing yourself to a class and having to learn about calculus is something,” Pulkinen said.

It is what the 22-year-old from Scottsdale, Ariz., signed up for when he decided to continue his figure skating career through the 2026 Olympic season and become a full-time, on-campus student after having deferred his matriculation at Columbia for a year.

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