During the lead-up to the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, NBC asked Ilia Malinin to appear in a cross-promotional commercial re-creating a scene from the Universal movie How To Train Your Dragon. For the 21-year-old figure skating phenom, who carries the movie’s branded keychain with him everywhere and calls his plushie of one of its characters his “spirit animal,” it was a no-brainer.
But over the course of the day, what excited him more was getting a glimpse behind the scenes of a television production for the first time. His marketing agent, Sheryl Shade, remembers Malinin turning to her at one point with wide eyes. “I want to do this,” he said.
It’s a phrase Shade has heard often since she started working with Malinin a year and a half ago, when the then-19-year-old, already considered the future face of skating, was first figuring out his ambitions outside of the rink. The answer, Shade soon found out, was everything—television, fashion, videogames, skateboarding and seemingly whatever else he had last tried.
“One of my goals is definitely, and this is skating related, but it’s to become a worldwide global celebrity,” Malinin, who is expected to first take the ice in Milan on Saturday in the team event, tells Forbes. “Kind of how The Rock was known for wrestling, and then he became an actor and has gone on to all these different opportunities, so my idea is to be similar, on that level.”
Of course, Malinin, who has collected an estimated $700,000 over the past 12 months, has a long way to go if he wants to emulate Dwayne Johnson, who topped last year’s Forbes ranking of the world’s highest-paid actors with $88 million. But the young American is already the highest-paid figure skater at these Olympics, according to Forbes estimates, and most experts believe he is only scratching the surface of his earnings potential.
To date, Malinin’s income has come almost exclusively from official Olympics sponsors, such as Coca-Cola and Xfinity, which are monitored by national and international governing bodies that set parameters around usage and time requirements. Shade says she made that decision to protect Malinin from piling on too much too soon, but also in acknowledgment of the reality that figure skating doesn’t capture much mainstream attention outside of a few nights every four years. At first, she didn’t find it easy to pitch him to potential sponsors.
“I must say, many of them did not know his name,” Shade says. “They would have to Google him, and they were like, oh, a male skater, what’s so great about him?”
They would soon discover Malinin’s talents, as well as his pedigree—both of his parents were Olympic figure skaters, for Uzbekistan—and, of course, his marketable nickname: the “Quad God.” Malinin, who was born and raised in Virginia, first coined the moniker as a 13-year-old when he landed his first quadruple jump in competition, and he changed his Instagram handle to reflect it.
The name turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Malinin eventually mastered all six of figure skating’s most common jump techniques as quads, becoming the first and only skater ever to land a quad axel—four and a half rotations in mid-air before landing backward—in competition. Malinin knows the name, and the move, has become his personal brand.
“Definitely more people know me for Quad God than necessarily my name,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a good thing because having your own nickname can have you stand out more for an audience.”
Peter Carlisle, managing director of Olympic sports at talent agency Octagon, says the nickname is “pre-packaged context” for TV viewers, who can instantly understand what to watch for and why it’s significant. “That’s really helpful,” he says. “You don’t have that many days to capture people’s attention.”
Malinin remains the only skater to have landed seven quads in a single free skate, which gives him a far higher maximum score than his competitors—meaning that as long as he doesn’t fall, he’s almost unbeatable. He has won every international competition he has entered since late 2023, including the last two world championships, and his showmanship has gone beyond the scorecard. He has added elements into his routines such as a backflip and a creation of his own that he calls the “raspberry twist”—a horizontal spin jump named after the translation of his Russian surname—which do not count for points with the judges but often elicit the biggest reactions from the crowd.
That flair has led former skating champions to describe him as not only a once-in-a-generation talent but a potentially transcendent star who could elevate the sport’s profile.
Malinin says that is his No. 1 goal, and he’s already contemplating how to accomplish it after the Olympics, whether it’s the Stars On Ice national tour, television specials or a social media blitz. He’s even testing out quintuple jumps, a feat that some sports scientists have speculated to be physically impossible but that Malinin says he has accomplished in practice and hopes to add to his competitive program after these Olympics.
“We have to try to make the sport a little more modern,” he says. “Bring in a younger audience so the sport can live on for longer.”
Shade puts it a different way: “He wants to make a spectacle.”
But first and foremost, Malinin has to win gold. If he does, he will trigger incentives in his existing sponsorship deals that should raise his income past $1 million—on par with what Forbes estimated American gold medalist Nathan Chen hauled in leading up to the 2022 Olympics. And if Malinin’s performance is a breakthrough cultural moment that makes him a household name, his earnings could really take off, especially leading into the 2030 Olympics in the French Alps.
“You can win and be the best in a particular Games, and there’s no question that’s significant, but it doesn’t happen every Games where you have someone emerge with this amazing story or captivate the world’s attention,” Carlisle says. “I do think it’ll be a really sharp pop for him after the Games because he hasn’t had that platform yet and everyone will see him doing things no one has done before.”
Two fellow members of Team USA offer possible comparisons: snowboarder Chloe Kim, who has earned an estimated $4 million over the past year, and skier Lindsey Vonn, at $8 million. There are also athletes from Asia testing the financial boundaries of the Winter Olympics. Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu is the highest-paid athlete at these Games, with an estimated $23 million, and two-time figure skating medalist Kim Yuna of South Korea cleared $16 million in 2014, her final year of competition.
It would be a lofty target, but Malinin has time to work on it, saying he hopes to skate at two more Olympics, which would bring his career to an end after the 2034 Games in Salt Lake City.
For all the excitement about his future plans, Malinin said recently that he was trying to savor his final days before the start of the Olympics, which could be his last in relative peace and anonymity.
“I definitely have thought about it a lot, and I definitely see that things can change drastically after the Olympics,” he says. “That’s something that I am really looking forward to, but also kind of scared of as well, because then I’m not going to know what to expect.”