President Donald Trump’s deadly invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president could be an unusually clear example of “blood for oil.” The president has nearly said as much himself. But one hitch is that Houston’s oil giants don’t immediately appear eager to buy what Trump is selling.

Following the administration’s military coup, Trump suggested he may go so far as to use U.S. tax dollars to directly reimburse the nation’s largest oil firms for the billions they’d need to invest to repair and modernize the South American country’s dilapidated oil and gas infrastructure. The offer ups the ante on officials’ previous pledge, made in the days running up to the seizure of Nicolás Maduro, to compensate Big Oil firms for assets previously nationalized by the Venezuelan state in exchange for the companies’ investment.

White House officials, including Energy Secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright, are set to meet again with executives of ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips, and Chevron—three Big Oil companies all headquartered in Houston—on Friday to discuss further incentives to cajole them to open their pocket books in Venezuela.

On Tuesday, Trump announced the United States is receiving between 30 and 50 million barrels of blockaded Venezuelan crude stranded in oil tankers and storage facilities—about two days’ U.S. supply—as part of a move to both choke off exports to China and increase pressure on interim president and former oil minister Delcy Rodríguez to give U.S. oil firms what Trump has called “total access” to Venezuela’s oil fields.

But Venezuela’s long history of countering U.S. imperial oil adventurism and sanctions—and resulting political instability—goes a long way toward explaining why Big Oil firms need such incredible assurances to entice them back into the country that hosts the globe’s largest proven oil reserves.

Standard Oil of New Jersey, which would later become ExxonMobil, began its involvement in Venezuela during World War I, with Chevron and Gulf Oil later following suit. Despite Standard’s best efforts to combat increasing moves toward oil-worker unionization and industry nationalization, U.S. companies were forced to begin divvying up their profits with the government in the early 1940s after Venezuelan President Eleazar López Contreras’ signing of the Hydrocarbons Law.

Venezuela played a formative role in the creation of the Organization for Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960, and by 1976 President Carlos Andrés Pérez had nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry. Still, Andrés Pérez left an opening for U.S. involvement by allowing Exxon, Conoco, and Chevron to operate jointly with Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the nation’s new state-owned oil company, known as PDVSA.

Luis Duno-Gottberg, the Lee Hage Jamail Professor of Latin American Studies at Rice University, told the Texas Observer in an email that those loopholes left detrimental operational practices, foreign partnerships, and technological dependence largely in place, rendering “nationalization more administrative than transformative”—critiques that resurfaced under President Hugo Chávez.

Nicolás Maduro in 2024 (Shutterstock)

Chávez restructured PDSVA after his political opposition led a general strike at the state oil company following military dissidents’ aborted 2002 coup attempt that ousted Chávez for two days before he was swiftly returned to power. Following the 2002 strike and putsch, Duno-Gottberg says Chavez raised oil royalties and taxes and restructured PDVSA’s management, redirecting oil revenues toward domestic social priorities, including health, education, and poverty reduction. Chavez further limited private participation in 2007, mandating that all oil ventures relinquish majority ownership to PDVSA. That’s when Exxon and Conoco jumped ship, and their assets were turned over to the state.

Duno-Gottberg told the Observer that U.S. sanctions and Chavez’s restructuring of PDVSA is a major reason why Venezuela’s oil industry fell into disrepair. The 2002-03 oil strike, and Chavez’s response, exemplifies the way oil has been used as both political weapon and tool, he said. The strike led to the dismissal of thousands of experienced engineers, managers, and operators, effectively “draining the state oil company of institutional memory and technical capacity,” Duno-Gottberg said; at the same time when Chávez’s opponents were attempting to stymie production to strong-arm political change.

“Over time, corruption, weak management, and rigid controls became entrenched, and later U.S. and international sanctions further restricted access to capital, spare parts, and export markets,” Duno-Gottberg told the Observer. “The cumulative effect was clear: declining production, rising accidents, and a system held together by improvisation rather than expertise, until what had once been one of the world’s most professional oil industries could no longer reliably sustain itself.”

That’s why Exxon and Conoco, at least, are likely to require more assurances from the Trump administration to mitigate against the political risks of a venture with a long history of expropriations, legal disputes, shifting rules, and political instability.

Beyond politics, the economics may also make little sense: There is already a global oil glut from OPEC+ countries, including Venezuela, and there’s no telling whether prices will rise enough to make upgrades, which will take years, profitable. In fact, Trump’s Tuesday acquisition of Venezuela’s stranded barrels tanked gas prices, already the lowest they’ve been since at least March 2021, even further. The average cost of a U.S. barrel fell to $56 and the average retail price per gallon remains $2.81, according to AAA.

Moreover, Venezuelan oil is heavy enough that it’s comparable to Canadian tar sands, making it costly to extract and refine due to the need for diluents. Only a small number of Houston refineries are properly equipped to handle it. Neighboring Guyana’s crude, meanwhile, is considered light and sweet, on par with that of Texas’ Permian Basin. As Amy Westervelt has pointed out, Trump’s toppling of Maduro more likely works to shield Exxon’s interest in Guyana, where Maduro had been aggressively staking claims, than to persuade the company to immediately re-enliven Venezuela’s playing fields.

Exxon CEO Darren Woods told Bloomberg in November that, “We’ve been expropriated from Venezuela two different times,” in response to a question about whether the company would tap Venezuela’s oil. “We’d have to see what the economics look like.”

But the economics might not be a problem for at least one Houston oil major. Chevron made an altogether different bet after Chávez closed Venezuela’s oil fields to private participation in 2007. Choosing to manage political risk instead of flee, Chevron remains the only U.S. oil company involved in Venezuela, benefitting from a special license that has allowed it to get around U.S. sanctions. The company’s operations currently account for about 17 percent of Venezuela’s current extraction.

Chevron released a statement almost immediately after the news of Maduro’s capture, signaling its willingness to fully back Trump’s naked imperial oil grab. “With more than a century in Venezuela, we support a peaceful, lawful transition that promotes stability and economic recovery,” the company said. “We’re prepared to work constructively with the U.S. Government during this period, leveraging our experience and presence to strengthen U.S. energy security.”

Environmental lawyer and human rights activist Steven Donziger knows a thing or two about Chevron’s track record in Latin America. Chevron withdrew its assets in Ecuador after European courts awarded Donziger’s clients—Indigenous tribes and farmers—$9.5 billion in damages for Texaco’s environmental devastation of the Amazon Rainforest. Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 1999, refused to pay the settlement and, through its law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, sued Donziger for allegedly obtaining the Ecuadorian ruling by means of racketeering.

The decades-long legal battle ultimately landed Donziger in federal prison and on house arrest after a separate, Chevron-connected law firm was appointed to prosecute him for allegedly violating court orders in a contempt-of-court case presided over by a Chevron-funded Federalist Society member.

Chevron, Donziger told the Observer, is in the best position to exploit the administration’s imperialism. “In a weird way, it could really happen, because the Maduro government—Delcy Rodríguez and the new current leadership—it’s in their interest to generate revenue too, right?”

Still, he said, even for Chevron, Venezuela’s oil fields are a longer-term play given the amount of risk and uncertainty.

“Chevron will be the leader and the most astute operator in this ever-changing, very dynamic playing field. They’re good at this. … There’s a reason they’re the only company in Venezuela. There’s a reason that they got away with mass environmental ecocide in Ecuador,” Donziger said. “They’ll be right there at the forefront, but it’s complicated.”

Downtown Houston (Matt Patterson via AP)

Both Donziger and Duno-Gottberg see the Trump administration’s oil grab as more about keeping Venezuela’s reserves from Cuba and China, while reasserting U.S. hegemony over the Western hemisphere, than pure profit-seeking. After all, before his capture, for instance, Maduro had already offered Trump a majority stake in both his country’s oil and mineral reserves. 

“When Venezuela signaled a willingness to deepen trade in Chinese currency and further integrate with China, it touched a much larger nerve than barrels per day,” said Duno-Gottberg. And the move may also allow the Trump administration to assert additional pressure on Mexico, Colombia, and Greenland. 

What’s largely lost in all this, of course, is the fact that the world still faces a climate emergency that is being fueled by the very resource the Trump administration is so determined to plunder. In fact, new climate data shows 2025 was one of the three hottest years on record—becoming the first year that global average temperatures broke the Paris Agreement’s threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Venezuela’s current extraction rates account for at least 0.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and its untapped reserves effectively amount to yet another climate bomb at a time when the International Energy Agency has warned against any new investment in oil and gas infrastructure.

Funneling Venezuela’s oil reserves into the atmosphere would not only further accelerate planetary warming, it would likely accelerate impacts on the very city that U.S. oil majors call home: Houston. The city saw more days over 90 degrees last year than ever before, and accelerating heat waves and hurricanes, like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, are increasingly presenting their own risks to the city’s oil and gas infrastructure.

“The conversation about climate has been, in my opinion, a major casualty of the Trump chaos,” Donziger told the Observer. “The invasion of Venezuela and the extraction of Maduro is an example of really how little the climate issue holds sway anymore on the world stage. It really is up to people to do something about it.”

The post Why Houston Oil Majors Are Hesitant to Go All In on Venezuela appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By RUSS BYNUM, Associated Press

The fatal shooting Wednesday of a woman by an immigration officer in Minneapolis was at least the fifth death to result from the aggressive U.S. immigration crackdown the Trump administration launched last year.

The Department of Homeland Security said the officer fired in self-defense as the woman tried to run down officers with her vehicle. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said video of the incident showed it was reckless and unnecessary. It occurred as the federal agency escalates immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota by deploying an anticipated 2,000 agents and officers.

Last September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed another person outside Chicago. Two people have died after being struck by vehicles while fleeing immigration authorities. And a California farmworker fell from a greenhouse and broke his neck during an ICE raid last July.

No officers or agents have been charged in the deaths.

Cook from Mexico shot during a traffic stop

ICE agents fatally shot Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop Sept. 12 in suburban Chicago. Relatives said the 38-year-old line cook from Mexico had dropped off one of his children at day care that morning.

At the time, the Department of Homeland Security said federal agents were pursuing a man with a history of reckless driving who entered the country illegally. They alleged Villegas González evaded arrest and dragged an officer with his vehicle.

FILE – Law enforcement personnel investigate after the Department of Homeland Security said an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a man in the Franklin Park suburb of Chicago on Sept. 12, 2025. (Candace Dane Chambers/Chicago Sun-Times via AP, File)

Homeland Security said the officer opened fire fearing for his life and was hospitalized for “serious injuries.” However, local police body camera videos showed the agent who shot Villegas González walking around afterward and dismissing his own injuries as “nothing major.”

Homeland Security has said the death remains under investigation.

Another shooting, this one non-fatal, occurred in Chicago last fall. Marimar Martinez survived being shot five times by a Border Patrol agent but was charged with a felony after Homeland Security officials accused her of trying to ram agents with her vehicle. The case was dismissed after videos emerged that Martinez’s attorneys said showed an agent steering his vehicle into Martinez’s truck.

Farmworker fell from greenhouse roof during ICE raid

Immigration authorities were rounding up dozens of farmworkers July 10 at Glass House Farms in southern California when Jaime Alanis fell from the roof of a greenhouse and broke his neck. The 57-year-old laborer from Mexico died at a hospital two days later.

FILE – This undated photo provided by his family shows Jaime Alanis inside Ventura County Medical Center, after he was injured during an immigration raid on July 10, 2025 in Camarillo, Calif. (Family photo via AP, File)

Relatives said Alanis had spent a decade working at the farm, a licensed cannabis grower that also produces tomatoes and cucumbers, located in Camarillo about an hour east of Los Angeles. They said he would send his earnings to his wife and daughter in Mexico.

During the raid, Alanis called family to say he was hiding. Officials said he fell about 30 feet from the greenhouse roof.

The Department of Homeland Security said Alanis was never in custody and was not being chased by immigration authorities when he climbed onto the greenhouse.

FILE – People embrace outside of Glass House Farms, a day after an immigration raid on the facility, on July 11, 2025, in Camarillo, Calif. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Man struck on California freeway after running from Home Depot

A man running away from immigration authorities outside a Home Depot store in southern California died after being hit by an SUV while he tried to cross a nearby freeway on Aug. 14.

Police in Monrovia northeast of Los Angeles said ICE agents were conducting enforcement operations when the man fled on foot to Interstate 210. He was running across the freeway’s eastbound lanes when an SUV hit him while traveling 50 or 60 mph miles. He died at a hospital.

The man killed was later identified by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network as 52-year-old Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez of Guatemala.

The Department of Homeland Security said Montoya Valdez wasn’t being pursued by immigration authorities when he ran.

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Gardener from Honduras killed on Virginia interstate

A pickup truck fatally struck Josué Castro Rivera on a highway in Norfolk, Virginia, as he tried to escape immigration authorities during a traffic stop Oct. 23.

Castro Rivera, 24, of Honduras, was heading to a gardening job with three passengers when ICE officers pulled over his vehicle, according to his brother, Henry Castro.

State and federal authorities said Castro Rivera ran away on foot and was hit by a pickup truck on Interstate 264.

The Department of Homeland Security said Castro Rivera’s vehicle was stopped as part of a “targeted, intelligence-based” operation and that Castro Rivera had “resisted heavily and fled.”

His brother said Castro Rivera came to the U.S. four years earlier and worked to send money to family in Honduras.

AP journalists Sophia Tareen in Chicago and Michael Biesecker in Washington contributed. Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.

On paper, the pun-driven, corn-forward musical “Shucked” sounds like a dud.

But the Tony-winning show, which opened Tuesday at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Minneapolis, proved to be a true delight. It’s devilishly clever and stupendously dumb, in the best possible sense.

A pair of narrators (Maya Lagerstam and Joe Moeller, the latter coming across as a gay version of “Saturday Night Live” cast member Mikey Day) tell the story of Cob County, an insular place of unknown origin surrounded by corn stalks and populated by folks perfectly happy to remain cut off from the rest of the world.

It opens with the postponement of the marriage of longtime sweethearts Maizy (Danielle Wade) and Beau (Nick Bailey) due to the mysterious death of the county’s corn crop. Maizy decides to leave town to search for someone who can help, despite protests from Beau.

Maizy ends up in Tampa (the place you land when you “can’t afford Orlando or Atlanta”), where she meets conman podiatrist Gordy (Quinn VanAntwerp), a self-professed “corn doctor” who Maizy mistakenly assumes can help. Gordy, who is in deep debt to the mob, sees Maizy’s bracelet made up of what he thinks are precious stones. When she tells him there’s plenty more beneath her house, he hatches a plan to extract the would-be riches from Cob County.

Writer Robert Horn (“13,” “Tootsie”) clearly loves Broadway traditions, as “Shucked” both celebrates and roasts them. It’s full of big musical numbers — written by Nashville vets Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally — and rapid-fire gags. It’s at times reminiscent of “The Music Man” and Noel Coward as well as “Airplane” and “30 Rock.”

Not all of the jokes work, but even the grumpiest theatergoers will find plenty of laughs. Cackles, even, as the obnoxiously loud guy sitting behind me barked throughout the show. (Note to Hennepin Arts: If this was a plant to game a positive review, he was so annoying, it could have backfired.)

The narrators, or as the show calls them “storytellers,” were a wise choice to frame the story. Not only do they get some of the best lines of the musical, they help keep things moving, particularly in the second act when they summarize events that lesser shows would waste 15 minutes or more explaining. Indeed, the brisk running time of about two hours is one of the greatest strengths of “Shucked.”

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The cast, too, is exceptional. In what initially comes across as a thankless role, Bailey (who is ridiculously hunky for a stage performer) belts the best song of the show, the barn-burning anthem “Somebody Will,” which gets a brief, celebratory reprise in the second act. (Oddly enough, the show also offers a brief nod to “Purple Rain” that had Tuesday’s audience cheering.)

Maizy’s cousin, the whiskey-making Lulu (Miki Abraham), gets her own moment to shine with “Independently Owned,” an ode to strong women who don’t need a man to be happy. That said, she finds herself drawn to the slippery Gordy, who VanAntwerp portrays with enough actual charm to make him believable.

While parents should probably leave their younger ones at home — there’s some spicy language and racy humor — “Shucked” offers a much-needed, gleeful and joyous break from the current darkness of the world.

‘Shucked’

When: Through Sunday
Where: Orpheum Theatre, 910 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis
Tickets: $179.95-$58.45 via hennepinarts.org
Capsule: “Shucked” can get corny, but it’s still a bushel of fun.

IRVINE, California — The allure of figure skating, what captivates millions who wouldn’t know Axel Paulsen from Ulrich Salchow, why it transcends the Olympic Games every four years, is its ability to tell a story. More than any other sport, there is a cinematic quality to skating.

It even comes with a soundtrack.

“That’s what makes skating unique to, let’s say, hockey, or something that’s based on a clock,” said Shae-Lynn Bourne, a former world champion ice dancer for Canada and now one of the sport’s top choreographers. “We get to express. So it’s kind of our athletic art.”

Ilia Malinin, figure skating’s current box office sensation, first emerged earlier this decade as the sport’s next great action hero, the self-proclaimed Quad God, a teenager not only capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound but doing 4 1/2 rotations before touching down.

Malinin, then 18, in September 2022 became the first person to successfully land a quadruple Axel, skating’s most difficult jump, in competition, a feat two-time Olympian Johnny Weir has compared to the first moon landing.

“He is beyond out of this world,” said Jason Brown, a 2022 Olympian.

Malinin won his first World title in 2024 in Montreal by breaking 2022 Olympic champion Nathan Chen’s free skate world record. In the free skate at last spring’s World Championships in Boston, he successfully defended his title by becoming the first person to land all six of skating’s jumps as quads.

“There’s no way to compare him to any skater from the past,” Russian coach Tatiana Tarasova, who has coached more Olympic and world champions than any other coach in figure skating history, told the Sport24 network. “Right now, he has no rivals, and back then, there wouldn’t have been any either. In the past, top athletes were only performing one or two quadruple jumps at best.

“Maybe in 15 or 20 years, someone stronger than Ilia will emerge, but in the past, there was no one like him.”

Malinin, who turned 21 last month, the face of the sport, the name on the top of the marquee at the Olympic Games, which open a month from Tuesday in Milan, and the U.S. Championships this week in St. Louis, is determined to redefine himself just as he has forced the sport to reimagine itself.

“This year,” he said, “I really put myself on the ice as a different skater.”

Make no mistake, Malinin still promises to make the Milano Ice Skating Arena his own personal launch pad. Yet for all of Malinin’s athleticism and his Beamonesque ability to take flight what has been most telling in what has already been a world record-shattering Olympic season has been the maturity of his skating, the willingness to take emotional risks in his programs.

As much as his ability to land the inconceivable, Malinin’s great strength has always been the imagination and courage to take his skating to places few even considered, let alone dared to reach for. Especially with his free skate program, Malinin has turned that focus inward yet is still pushing the edge of the envelope.

He is the best in the world at what he does, perhaps the best ever, yet he is still a young man in search of himself, his voice. He has found it in two autobiographical programs, the short program and the free skate, which together trace his path to Milan and chart his course ahead with a vulnerability and honesty that reveals a young adult willing to admit while he might have mastered all the jumps, he doesn’t have all the answers, yet has the courage to embrace life’s uncertainty.

Interspersed with his free skate’s music is Malinin’s own voice.

On the eve of the most important two months of his life so far, with the world watching, as he prepares to glide across Milan’s golden pond, Illia Malinin has a story to tell.

“The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,” he says at one point in the free skate. At another, he says, “Embrace the storm.”

“It’s like both programs have the idea of being, like a process of, you know, changing and becoming a better person,” Malinin said in an interview after a training session at the Great Park Ice in Irvine, where the Virginia-based skater makes regular stops to work with Bourne and coach Rafael Arutyunyan. “But I’d say like the short program is a little bigger representation of, like, the physical battles that you will have to go through, of like having that change.

“The long program is a little more like deeper in thought, and you really have to be more like psychological thinking about it.”

Both programs are a reflection of Bourne and Arutyunyan’s influence, as well as Malinin looking at his skating and at his life through a wider lens.

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“I really believe that the story, what they’re skating about, being present and committed and having meaning to every move is what brings the sort of the ties everything together, and that’s also what lures the audience in,” said Bourne, who choreographed both programs. “And the judges are just the audience. If you’re captivating the people, you’re captivating them, you have to tell stories. It’s like when you go to a movie. It’s like a four-minute and in the short it’s two minutes and 50 seconds. So it’s you want to, you want to make people feel something at the end of the day, and you want them to remember what you did on that ice, whether you make them quiet or you make them clap, or you actually involve them in what you do.”

The short program titled “The Lost Crown” is the sort of action packed routine the sport has come to expect from Malinin.

“There’s some sort of magical quality to the actual story where he does possess some extra abilities to be this ultimate warrior,” Bourne said. “… He’s sort of like this, coming from the desert and laying low, I would say. And so that’s why the beginning is low, and this kind of mysterious beginning where he’s not been in hiding, but in training in a way very similar to his own life. Nothing beautiful. Training, is it’s a grind or you fall it’s not pretty, and it burns to train. It’s like some days you question yourself, but yeah, there’s elements of that. And I think it’s showing off that sort of getting started, getting into the training, getting into becoming that Ultimate Warrior and the strongest version of yourself.

“And then, you know, then the fight begins. Music shifts, and it’s the battle, you know, survival of the fittest, right? It’s very much that story and, and taking control of and believing, and when the last final part comes, it’s more him, it comes in and it’s like rapping and grooving, and it’s explosive, and he’s explosive. So you wanted to end on a bang and show that he’s the ultimate warrior, and not just of himself, you know, like, what is it you you, you have to be your own competition if you continue to be your best self, that is the competition, and that will take you pretty far.”

Malinin & Company have named his free skate program “A Voice” and it is just that: his own words, vulnerable and contemplative, honest and bold, popping up through a blend of compositions.

“And it felt very fitting for where he’s at in his own life,” Bourne said. “Just turned 21 and he’s having a lot of those thoughts about what’s life and he’s saying what he feels right now.”

Malinin worked with Bourne’s husband, Bohdan Turok, a director, producer, screenwriter, to record his voice for the production.

“Ilia wanted his own voice somehow to say something meaningful,” Bourne said. “So my husband took him to his studio and helped sort of guide him with the choice of words, letting it come from Ilia, but kind of guiding him so it comes across right and where to put that in the program, and then recording him and kind of directing how he delivers it, just like I would with the movement, he did it with the voice.”

And it is Malinin’s voice, his vision in every way.

“Yeah, it’s definitely something that I’ve noticed just in my life is I see things completely differently,” Malinin said. “See like everything to me, just looks different. When I see something, I feel like I can relate this to something, or, you know, have a similarity to this or this. It’s like I have a really deeper thinking about anything I do.”

Malinin was asked if this depth was the result of maturity or life experiences.

“I would say everything, all the above, you can say just the life experiences you go through, and you know, just maturity, but that also, that you know correlates with how long you’ve been alive from,” he said. “Call it that. So you really have that idea of how reality really is.”

What’s his reality now?

“My reality is getting ready to compete in that Olympics,” Malinin said, breaking into a grin, “and going for that gold.”

Although Malinin was basically raised at the skating rink but didn’t always feel destined for the Olympics.

Both his parents, Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, were Olympians for Uzbekistan. Malinina won the 1999 Grand Prix final and Four Continents event. Skorniakov was a seven-time national champion. They later moved to the U.S. and were married in 2000. Four years later, Ilia was born in Fairfax, Virginia, in Washington D.C.’s suburbs, where his parents were coaching.

Malinin was 6 when he first skated at a Reston, Virginia, rink. Skating was the family business. Valery Malinin, Tatiana’s father, skated for the Soviet Union before turning to coaching. His grandson’s first love, however, was soccer.

“Neymar was my favorite player,” he said, referring to the Brazil superstar.

So while his parents were on the ice coaching, Malinin spent his free time dribbling around the rink. If his parents were frustrated by his lack of interest, they didn’t show it. Valery Malinin cautioned the couple not to pressure their son into skating, that he would eventually come around to the family business.

“They tried not to force me into this,” Illia said. “They really wanted me to find my own passion, pick what I wanted to do, but yet that kind of went down into being a skater.

“I think the whole thing around it was really just growing up in an environment where my parents are at the rink, 24/7, right? So I had nowhere really to go. Then, you know, chilling at the rink. You know, playing soccer with the kids there. So it’s like, that’s where I grew up in. And at some point, I realized, oh, let’s, you know, let me try to get on the ice, right? Because that looks interesting. What they do, right?”

He was 12 when he decided to get serious about skating.

“I really just thought, I’m progressing so much quicker than I realized that now I should,” he said. “I came to a conclusion with me and my parents. We sat down and we talked about it, and I thought, you know, why don’t we try to put in a little more effort, you know, time into this?”

His parents continue coach him with Arutyunyan, who coached Chen to Olympic gold, also part of the coaching team.

Malinin won the 2016 U.S. juvenile title, picking up the U.S. intermediate crown a year later. In 2018, he won the Asian Open Trophy’s advanced novice competition. But he missed both the 2020 and 2021 U.S. championships with injuries. There was no doubting his talent, but plenty of questions within American skating about his ability to stay healthy.

“That was kind of the concern,” Malinin admitted. “But I think now I’ve kind of gotten through that area being, I know what I’m doing with my training, and I really have a solid plan how to prevent those injuries. So it’s really, have a strategic plan of what’s the best way I can keep progressing, keep improving, but also, you know, just so I don’t break my body.”

Healthy, Malinin’s breakthrough came at the 2022 U.S. Championships in Nashville, essentially the sport’s Olympic Trials. He landed four quad jumps in the free skate to finish second overall.

“I definitely wasn’t expecting to skate this good and especially place second,” Malinin told reporters at the time.

Neither was the Olympic selection committee, which selected Vincent Zhou and Brown to join Chen at the Beijing Olympics.

“I came to that competition, of course, coming back from those injuries,” Malinin says now. “So my goal wasn’t the Olympics, but in the back of my mind, I also thought about, you know, what if you do so and so, you know, especially having that first day, you know, a good short program, and everyone behind me, like, oh, you can actually go (to the Olympics).

“So that kind of played a part, played a part in how I felt when I wasn’t named on the team, because everyone believed in me. Everyone had these, you know, thoughts and wanted me to go (to the Olympics), and then not going there just made me not understand, you know, everyone said I was gonna go. Why didn’t I? You know, but again, looking at another perspective, that if I did go to those Olympics, I don’t think I’d be skating after these Olympics.”

As a sort of consolation prize, U.S. Figure Skating sent Malinin to the 2022 World Championships after the Olympics. He placed ninth. At the World Junior Championships later that spring, he broke world junior records for short program, free skate and total score en route to claiming the gold medal.

Canada’s Kurt Browning was the first skater to successfully land a quadruple jump in competition, hitting a quad toe-loop at the World Championships in March 1988. Chen had five quad jumps in his free skate in winning the Olympic gold medal at the Beijing Games.

But the quad Axel remained elusive. The jump is skating’s most difficult because it requires a skater take off from the forward outside edge of one skate then land on the back outside edge of the other skate, necessitating 4 1/2 rotations.

“Do you think that anyone will manage to do a quadruple Axel?” Meryl Davis, the 2014 Olympic ice dance champion with Charlie White, asked Chen in a December 2018 interview for the Olympic Channel.

“Difficult to say,” Chen responded. “I think it’s doable, but it probably won’t happen anytime soon.”

Three and a half years later, Malinin at the U.S. International Classic, an early season event in Lake Placid in September 2022, rocked figure skating by landing the first quad Axel in competition.

“Four-point-five revolutions in the blink of an eye,” Weir said.

“The craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do on the ice,” Adam Rippon, a 2018 Olympian, told reporters.

Or at least the craziest until Malinin began doing on ice back flips during the 2024-25 season after the International Skating Union, the sport’s global governing body, lifted a ban on the stunt.

A month after Lake Placid, Malinin proved he was no one-hit wonder, landing a quad Axel at Skate America in becoming the youngest male to win the Grand Prix event. After winning the 2023 U.S. title, then finishing third at the 2023 Worlds, Malinin at the Grand Prix final later that year had the first quad Axel in a short program and then in the free skate became the first person to perform all six quads in competition.

Malinin shattered his own free skate world record in winning last month’s Grand Prix final, posting a 238.24 score for the long program, well above his previous free skate record of 227.79 and Chen’s world record 224.92), sticking a record seven clean quadruple jumps along the way.

“One of the most things that I’ve accomplished was being able to get this perfect layout of the seven quads in a program done,” Malinin said.

He owns the top three free skate scores of all-time and three of the five total competition scores over 330 points.

All of which led Tarasova to dismiss comparisons of Malinin by the Russian media to Olympic champions Alexei Yagudin (2002) and Evgeni Plushenko (2006), considered the gold standard for male skaters in the pre-Chen era.

“Plushenko, Yagudin, and Malinin are entirely different cases,” Tarasova told Sport24. “Perhaps, emotionally, Alexei Yagudin had a stronger presence than Ilia, but that’s not what matters here. No one has ever done what Malinin is capable of technically.”

And we might now be seeing only a glimpse of what Malinin is truly capable of.

“Maybe some of the things that I haven’t achieved yet is being at my very top level,” he said. “There’s still a lot more progress that I can do, especially in the next, let’s say, three Olympic cycles that I still want to skate.

“Hopefully in those years, I’ll be able to become the fullest skater that I can be.

“I’m playing everything by ear, and how I feel in general, and the passion that I have for skating. So, who knows? Might be a fourth or fifth, or I mean, we’ll see how long I can keep going.”

“Why not go until your body can’t do it anymore?’

After a recent session working with Bourne at Great Park Ice, he hinted at attempting a quintuple jump.

“We’ll have to see what’s, what’s there,” he said, “and that will all be determined after Milan.”

Until then, Malinin is focused on the story he wants to tell the world, a story of courage and uncertainty, struggle and triumph.

His story.

“In the end, it’s always shifting and where he’s at now, from where we began, it’s changing, because I can even see it now when I watch him perform, it’s becoming more and more real and more meaningful to him with each performance,” Bourne said. “Today, he actually skated that program, did a run through of it, and I felt I got goosebumps watching him, because it felt truthful.

“So it adds a real, personal button to the program, which he really wanted to do. And so I think it’s really about kind of going into the unconscious, diving really into it, and going into the unknown, the darkness. And finding, finding your way, finding the light within that. And you don’t, I think the whole point is, don’t take the easy road.

“There’s a lot you can discover in oneself, not by kind of closing things off, but actually entering the difficult things. And so that’s what I think, really trying to understand the unconscious and listening to it, trusting it, and following his own voice. I think you kind see a struggle, and you see him entering that world and then coming out of it with that sort of message, like showing this is what I’m doing. This is my path. You might not like it. You might not like this music. You might not like that. I’m speaking. It doesn’t matter.”The ultimate thing is I’m following my way and trusting it and whatever comes with it, accepting the good, the bad, the dark, the light and embracing it all.”

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