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

In 2021, famous Russian figure skating coach Alexei Mishin said that no figure skater will be able to successfully perform a quadruple axel in his 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 in 1998, 10 years after Canadian Curt Browning performed the first certified quadruple twisty jump, the toe loop, at the World Championships, marking the beginning of the men’s figure skating era.

Over the subsequent decades, more skaters would come along, such as Goebel, and add more types of snowboard jumps. (There are six main types of figure skating jumps, which are named after their creators and are distinguished by their takeoff, whether with a blade, edge or toe.) By 2016, all quadruple jumps 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. Dubbed the “Simon Biles of figure skating,” Malinin has not been shy about his desire to obtain one of these items, reportedly going so far as to prepare for a pentathlon attempt late last year during training sessions. Recently, the Associated Press declared that the pentathlon cannot be done, stating that “most sports scientists agree that the speed and amplitude necessary for pentathlon jumps are 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 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 would] “You have a lot of lag, spin on the way down, and you have kind of an open position,” says Justin Dillon, chief high-performance officer at U.S. Figure Skating. “This technique created a very interesting 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.

The heights that top male athletes can jump are relatively similar across the board. Malinin and other elite male skaters rise about 20 inches off the ground at the peak of their jump. The only thing left to fiddle with is the rotation speed. “What we’ve learned in the meantime is that what makes or breaks a jump is the ability to snap into that rotational position as quickly as possible, because that gives you longer to maintain that really high angular velocity,” Hannigan says.