At the 2025 World Figure Skating Championships, held in Boston in late March, the United States won three of the four disciplines for the first time in history. The team was led by Ilia Malinin, who won gold in men’s singles with a score of 318.56. Malinin successfully executed six quadruple jumps in an impressive performance, breaking the world record for the most quadruple jumps landed in a single program.
Malinin is a strong favorite in the men’s event and believes that winning three gold medals across the five Olympic skating disciplines is definitely a possibility in 2026. Malinin won his second consecutive World Championship by 31-point margin, meaning he could have fallen twice during his performance and still won. As the only skater in the world capable of landing a quad axel, Malinin gains a significant advantage through the sheer number of quadruple jumps and combinations he includes in his free skate. In 1999, Timothy Goebel made history by landing three quadruple jumps in the same program;Malinin has since doubled that feat with six, and aims for seven in his next program.
American skater Alysa Liu won gold in the women’s singles with a score of 222.97. Liu retired from competitive skating at 16, but eventually returned and won a World Championship at 19. Lui now has a strong chance of making the Olympic podium in women’s singles, which no American woman has achieved since Sasha Cohen in the 2006 Games.
In the Pairs category, Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov placed sixth with a score of 199.29, while Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea followed closely in seventh with a score of 195.38. In the Ice Dance category, Madison Chock and Evan Bates won gold with a score of 222.06.
Team USA has not won an Olympic gold medal in figure skating since 1960, and has only won two gold medals in its entire history. According to USA Today, the 2026 Winter Olympics might offer the best opportunity in decades.
The Olympic team event could be a two-country race. Since the Winter Olympics in 2014, five main countries have been competing for podium spots: Canada, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. As of now, the United States’ competition could be Japan, and Team USA has a good chance of bringing home several medals. Malinin said, “All of us would have to show up for the Olympics and really be on our ‘A’ game, be 100 percent confident, 100 percent ready.”
Russia, largely considered to produce the best figure skaters in the world, will be allowed to enter one skater or team per discipline as its Olympic ban comes to an end. From 2014 to 2022, Russia won five of the nine medals awarded in Olympic women’s events — including all three gold medals — each by a different athlete.
