Snowboarders at the 2026 Winter Olympics are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible

In 2021, famous Russian figure skating coach Alexei Mishin He said No figure skater will be able to successfully perform a quadruple axel in their life. The following year, two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu was training to master the vault, but when he attempted to do it at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, he was unable to complete the four-and-a-half turns in the air. Mishin’s statement appears to have been verified.

“I thought I would see a pentagonal toe before I saw a quadruple axel,” says 2002 Olympic bronze medalist Timothy Goebel, known in his time as the “Quad King.” Goebel was the first skater to perform a quadruple Salchow jump in competition since 1998, 10 years later Canadian Kurt Browning He performed the first sanctioned quadruple twist jump, the toe loop, at the World Championships, marking the beginning of the era of men’s figure skating.

Over the subsequent decades, more skiers would come along, like Goebel, and add more types of quad bikes. (There are six main types of Ice skating jumps(which are named after their creators and are characterized by their take-off, whether blade, edge, or toe-off.) By 2016, all of the quads had been successfully completed in competition—except for that axel that Mishin, Goble, and others thought they would never see.

Then, in 2022, Ilya Malinin did it. The Virginian, who was just 17 at the time, was calling himself the “Quad God” online before the US International Figure Skating Championships that year, but his landing of the quad axel cemented the title. The American phenom did not make the 2022 Olympic team, but has won the world title twice in the past two seasons and is the favorite to take home gold in the men’s singles ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics based on his technical ability alone. All of this has left the skateboarding world wondering what might be next for the jumping phenomenon, and for the sport in general.

The quintet, a five-turn jump, is the next logical step in this progression. Malinin, who has been called the “Simone Biles of figure skating,” He was not shy about his desire To land one of these, he reportedly went so far as to prepare for a five-a-side attempt late last year during training sessions. Recently, news agency He weighed and declared that the pentathlon could not be done, saying “most sports scientists agree that the speed and amplitude necessary for five-turn jumps is truly impossible”, although they did not quote any naysayers directly.

However, the quintet is not as impossible as the AP article would have you believe, and if anyone can pull it off, it’s Malinin, a generational talent who has already done generational talent things. The pentathlon will be the culmination of decades of development in the sport, from the judging system to training practices to how the jumps themselves are defined.

“I think it’s possible,” Malinin said He told CBS Sunday Morning.

If you are watching Older figure skating programs, you may notice that, in the past, they used to jump differently. “When people go up to jump, (they’ll have) a lot of lag, and they’ll rotate on the way down, and they’ll have kind of an open position,” says Justin Dillon, chief high-performance officer at U.S. Figure Skating. This technique created a very pleasing arc in the air; It had a floating, ethereal quality.

“But that’s not as effective when we’re talking about these multi-rotation jumps, because you now have a limited amount of air time in which you can actually reach your maximum angular speed and then maintain it,” says Lindsay Slater Hannigan, associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Illinois Chicago and director of sports science for US Figure Skating.