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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/GrannyMay243 on 2025-03-09 00:40:20+00:00.
|Overcautious TW for brief discussions of homophobia|
While a number of excellent figure skating posts have been submitted to this sub over the years, few focus on the drama of the current quad—a term which here means “four year Olympic cycle.” Those who’ve given the sport more than a passing glance in the past decade will be familiar with the word in another context: quad jumps. And if you’re interested in listening, boy do I have a story to tell you involving the person who can land more of them than anyone else currently in international competition.
What the hell is a quad jump? (Scoring for the Uninitiated)
I’m so glad you asked!
Figure skating is one of those sports where you’ve got a list of elements you can execute and a certain point value assigned to each one. An easier skill could be worth two points, a harder one five, and so on. You stick a bunch of elements together into a program, which will be scored based on the starting value of each trick (Base Value, or BV); how well you execute them (Grade of Execution, or GOE); and more nebulous stuff like skating skills, interpretation, and how well you stuck everything together (Program Components Score, or PCS).
Some big ticket elements that you probably already know about are the jumps. Kick off the ice, fly into the air, spin around a few times, land on one foot. Exciting—and difficult—stuff! There are six different types, which I’ll explain as they become relevant to the story, and they’re usually listed with a number describing the amount of rotations completed mid-air. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the harder the jump, and the more points the whole thing is worth. Single jumps are worth no points at the highest level of competition, and Quadruple or Quad are worth the most.
Quad Quad Revolution!
Until around a decade ago, most elite skaters—the kind you see at the Olympics—had all their double jumps, most if not all of their triples, and maybe a quadruple or two. Then a fun little period known colloquially as “The Quad Revolution” happened, and having multiple quadruple jumps became a lot more common. There are a lot of stories involving Elton John and a woman with noodle hair and Winnie the Pooh and grandpa water and the War in Ukraine, but we’re going to gloss over most of that and focus our discussion on the status quo today.
Okay, so it’s October of 2022. The Olympics were really traumatic, but they’re over. The top five finishers in Men’s Singles had three or more quadruple jump attempts during their long programs. Gold Medalist Nathan Chen leaves active competition to focus on his studies; 3-time Olympic Medalist and “Greatest Men’s Figure Skater Alive” Yuzuru Hanyu announces his retirement. People have landed quadruple jumps of every single type… except for one.
I sort of lied to you earlier—the number of rotations in a jump does equal the number we put in front of it… unless that jump is an Axel. To put it simply and somewhat inaccurately, an Axel is the only jump you go into facing forwards, and the half rotation you do to land backwards does not count towards the total. So a Single Axel is really 1.5 turns, a double 2.5, and so on. They’re notoriously difficult, and worth the most points because of this. The aforementioned Yuzuru Hanyu, quite possibly the greatest figure skater of our time, could and cannot land the clean quadruple in competition. Four and a half rotations—partway to a Quint.
It’s October of 2022 and people are still writing jokes into their Yuri!!! On Ice fanfiction about how a Quad Axel, the hypothetical 4A, is impossible. It’s a hyperbole, a myth, a legend—there are contemporary articles suggesting humans might be biologically incapable of such a feat.
And then a seventeen-year-old boy lands one at a quiet, early-season challenger competition.
Lights. Chaos. Action.
Enter “quadg0d” Ilia Malinin.
A Foreword
So before we get into everything that’s gone down over the past three years, I think it’s important to point out that the athletes we’re discussing are human beings first and foremost. I’m gonna do my best to be respectful and neutral in my record of events, and I’ll ask you to do the same if you ever make it out the other side of this ridiculously long story. Enough nasty shit has been said about skaters on the internet—I’m not trying to dunk on Malinin or anybody else, here.
Now, you can organize the history preceding Hoodiegate in a number of ways. We’re gonna go chronologically, but I’d also like you to keep in mind that these events can be broadly sorted into two categories:
- Actual Controversies | Things Malinin did or said to piss people off directly
- General Prejudices | Things that nobody did or said and are just an unfortunate symptom of figure skating fan culture
Tech vs. Artistry: Somebody’s poisoned the water hole!
‘Art or Tech?’ is a debate as old as time, and an example of the latter. It’s a dead horse that’s been beaten into such small particles that the figure skating community is in danger of causing nuclear fission one of these days.
Remember what I told you about program scoring? Half your score is element-based, with base values per element and GOE for how well you do. The other half, PCS, is meant to reward skaters for having pretty, well-constructed programs and good rhythm and other je ne sais quoi that can’t be assigned a base value.
Ideally, this would mean skaters with less tech content could defeat skaters with more by working really hard on things like edge control, program composition, and performance. Skaters with high tech content have historically had a harder time hitting these marks, so everyone would be encouraged to improve PCS to keep their competitive edge. (Caveat: There are a lot of ‘why’s and ‘well, actually’s here that I’m not going to get into, but the skating part of figure skating is my favorite so hit me up in the comments if you’re in the mood for a ramble.)
Only problem is, that’s not quite how it works.
PCS isn’t worth as much when stacked against a program with a high number of quads, and judges sometimes don’t score it according to their protocol. It’s a big tool for reputation- or nationality-based judging, unfortunately, and everyone has different ideas of how it should be awarded. So you’ll have skaters like Jason Brown, who are renowned for their artistry but can’t land quads, and skaters like Ilia Malinin, who are known mostly for their crazy technical content, and—since they’re both getting high PCS—the former will never come out on top because of the sheer base value imbalance.
This causes a lot of fandom political drama, which I’ll try to explain as painlessly as possible. Essentially: People have favorite skaters. Some of these faves can’t quad/high triple very well. This means they will not win, unless the quadsters fall or otherwise fuck up their programs. This makes them underdogs, which makes them more people’s faves. This makes people angry at the quadsters, who have their own fans, and then everyone starts screaming at each other about tech vs. artistry.
Having fun yet?
Good, because nobody is.
So, it’s October of 2022…
The impossible has become the miraculous. Some random kid has just landed the quad axel—although he wasn’t exactly random.
Malinin had a pretty noteworthy 2021-22 season. It was (functionally) his senior debut, and he had three kinds of quads in his long program. Despite taking silver at U.S. nationals, he was a little too green to attend the Olympics, so they assigned him to both the Senior and Junior World Championships instead. This isn’t super common, and while it gained him some eyeballs, most people were focused on the madness that was Beijing 2022. Landing the 4A that fall brought even more attention and scrutiny down on his head, and earned him the unenviable role of ‘jumping bean poster child’ in the Tech vs. Art debate.
So there are already some bad feelings towards this kid, just because he’s not really bringing it artistically, and there’s the usual outrage about how quads wreck your body and he’ll be struck blind before reaching the age of twenty-one or whatever. Then there’s the fact that he’s going by the self-styled title of “quadg0d,” which is seen as arrogance in the wake of greats like Hanyu and Chen, the latter of whom was known by the fan-given nickname “Quad King.” It was around this time that Malinin developed a reputation that continues to follow him today—a reputation of self-importance and disrespect for artistic expression.
Is this accurate? Really, depends on who you ask. I’ve met a handful of internet strangers who claim to know him—figure skating is a small fucking world, so they very well might—and they say he’s actually quite nice/polite/quiet/etc., and that the quadg0d stuff is more of a persona than evidence of a prima donna personality. Others discount this narrative, and insist that all the attention on him has gone to his head. We’ll see more support for both clai…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1j6vhkc/figure_skating_that_time_the_fs_fandom_lost_its/