Ilia Malinin Wasn’t Planning to Be a Figure Skater. Now He’s Favored to Win Olympic Gold

If both your parents are Olympic figure skaters, there are a few things you might expect: getting introduced to the ice at an early age, lessons and competitions that increase in intensity, and frequent conversations about following in the family footsteps.

Well, for Ilia Malinin, whose mother Tatiana Malinina and father Roman Skorniakov both competed for Uzbekistan in the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics, it didn’t exactly go that way. 

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“They didn’t want me to skate,” says Malinin.