I was able to watch Ilia Malinin compete at the U.S. Nationals in St. Louis this past January, and he was every bit the legendary trailblazing athlete and artist.
In watching his response following his all-too-human performance last week at the 2026 Olympics, I saw an impressive human, just 21 years old, who already could place this one single performance within the trajectory of a long-game, and within minutes after skating off the ice generously celebrated his competitors’ wins.
I cannot imagine the pressure for him at the Olympics as one of the most celebrated competitors, with an intensity of news coverage focused on him. He is a world-class inspiration as an athlete, an artist, an innovator, and most importantly, as a human being.
The Olympics, or this one free skate in this one Olympics, is simply one of many times he has brought his whole self and shared his gifts with the world.
This time he showed yet another part of himself. He is better than being merely the “Quad God.” He is a living, breathing human being — not so different than all of us with the not insubstantial caveat that he can spin 350 RPM for 4.5 revolutions while 30 inches above the ice and land elegantly in a sequined costume with 200 pounds of pressure on a 3-mm edge of a blade — who somehow has pushed what we previously thought were normal physical human limitations.
It’s not so much of fascination that he should have been imperfect, flawed, this one time. Rather, the great wonder is that this human has performed seemingly flawlessly, effortlessly, impossibly beautifully, tens and hundreds of times.
That he is human, like all of us, and still can achieve what was formerly unimaginable is what is extraordinary about Ilia Malinin.
Pauline Lee is a former Mankato resident who represented Chinese Taipei in the Ladies’ Figure Skating Olympic Championships in 1988 as a frosh at Stanford living in the great dorm Rinconada. She lives in St. Louis and is a professor of Chinese Thought and Cultures at Saint Louis University. She is author of “The Virtue of Desire” and with Rivi Handler-Spitz and Haun Saussy, of “A Book to Burn and A Book to Keep (Hidden).”