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Ilia Malinin Dazzles at U.S. Championships

by Lois Elfman After missing the last two U.S. Special to the News-Press Figure Skating Championships due to injuries, 17-year-old Ilia Malinin from Marshall High School in Falls Church arrived at the 2022 U.S. Nationals in Nashville intent to show the judges and spectators what he could do. He dazzled in the short program and free skate, winning the silver medal in Senior Men behind five-time U.S. Champion Nathan Chen.

“We would skate a full run-through with all jumps every day, both short and long,” said Malinin, who was born and grew up in Northern Virginia. His family lives about 10 minutes away from his training rink, SkateQuest Reston.

Skating such a strong, quad-filled free skate felt “relieving” said Malinin, whose primary coaches are his parents, Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, both Olympians who represented Uzbekistan.

“I was a bit excited because I wasn’t expecting to do so well,” said Malinin. “I skate clean” (no mistakes) “every day in practice, both short and long, so it kind of made sense where I skate that clean, but the way I skated it, I was surprised.”

As he finished to the roar of the crowd, it felt amazing. “I couldn’t really think,” Malinin said. “I didn’t even know what just happened. I definitely thought that I impressed everyone and everyone was excited to watch.”

After the 2021 U.S. Championships were skated without an audience, all the skaters were happy to see people in the stands and hear actual applause. Malinin said it made him more determined to land all his jumps since a lot of people were watching.

Malinin landed his first quadruple jump when he was 14 or 15, becoming consistent within the past year or so. Progressing to such an extraordinary level by age 17 seems even more incredible since he didn’t really take skating that seriously until he won the bronze medal in the Novice Men’s division at the 2019 U.S. Championships.

“At first, when I started skating, we thought I was just going to skate for fun and try it out,” said Malinin. “My first year in juvenile, we qualified for Nationals. I wasn’t even that good. I skated like three times a week and I qualified for Nationals. Then the second year, I won juvenile Nationals. After that, I started progressing more and more. When I went novice, around Nationals, that was when I realized I can actually be good at this sport and I think I should put in more time and effort to see what I become.”

Coming back from injury taught Malinin to be careful when training. “You can’t just brainlessly go jump. You have to think about your health and not just landing a jump,” he said.

As first alternate to the U.S. Olympic team in the men’s event, Malinin is the third skater named to the team who is the child of Olympians. “It’s definitely an honor. Also, now it kind of seems like it’s a family tradition. Since they both went, it makes sense if I go too,” he said.

Malinin has attended regular schools, including high school. Away from skating, he likes skateboarding.

He only took a couple of days off after the U.S. Championships because as an alternate he’s on call for the Olympic Winter Games if any of the three men named to the team cannot compete. He will likely compete at the World Championships. Malinin had solid international experience last fall, winning two Junior Grand Prix events and taking the bronze medal at Cup of Austria.

Skorniakov and Malinina are happy to see their son potentially become an Olympian. “It’s a big achievement for him,” said Skorniakov. Sometimes there are challenges coaching their child, but most of the time it’s good. “We’ve learned how to work through that.”

Watching Malinin skate his amazing free skate in Nashville was very satisfying given all the work they put in to reach that performance. Living in Virginia has been a great atmosphere for work, raising a family and helping their son reach his skating potential.

“We try to use all the knowledge from the experiences that we had in our training,” said Skorniakov. “We try to use that and also try to use some of the advantages you can get here. We like it very much here. We have a great staff at our rink that helps and supports us every possible way. Everybody was very excited.”

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FEBRUARY 3 - 9, 2022 | PAGE 5

ILIA MALININ. (Photo: U.S. Figure Skating)

So finally we say goodbye to both the Washington Redskins and the “we try harder” Washington Football Team.

As Arlingtonians hail the Commanders we can finally end the debate over our sports team’s exploitation of Native American culture, a controversy that threatened to spur barroom fights for 30 years.

But let’s apply some perspective: the Indians preceded us here for 13,000 years!

The first recorded details were supplied by Capt. John Smith during his 1608 voyage up the Potomac. Some 10 sites have been discovered within Arlington’s borders, most on the banks of the river. Digs further inland have produced artifacts near N. Glebe and Military Roads, the southern end of Four Mile Run and along the border with Falls Church on what once was the Isaac Crossman farm. That’s according to C.B. Rose Jr.’s “The Indians of Arlington,” which she published in 1957 to mark the 350th anniversary of Virginia’s Jamestown settlement.

Their more prominent site, one that Smith—viewing the exotic peoples onshore from the safety of his canoe— was called “Nameroughquena” (opposite today’s Roosevelt Island). Those people were known as the Necostins, likely part of the larger Piscataway nation in Maryland.

Surrounding the Necostin community of perhaps 300 (of whom 80 were able-bodied men, quoth Smith), was a settlement of people

Our Man in Arlington called Nacotchtank By Charlie Clark (Anacostia). In the 1940s, work near the mouth of Marcey Creek inserted Arlington into the annals of archaeology as a site of early Native American civilization. Major Carl Manson dug up cord-marked pottery fragments that went on display at the Smithsonian Institution (still there in the anthropology department of the National Museum of Natural History). “The Marcey Creek site was a small village, occupied by a sedentary people for sufficient time to enable the soil to increase in thickness as much as 23 inches,” he wrote in 1948 in Cambridge University Press’s journal American Antiquity. “The depth of the culture-bearing layers, the crudeness of the stone artifacts, the absence of organic material, and the complete absence of pipes indicates a greater antiquity for this site than for any other thus far excavated in the Potomac Valley.” Today Arlingtonians can view locally unearthed arrowheads from the Woodland period (3,000 years ago) at the Gulf Branch Nature Center, one of only two Northern Virginia sites included on the Virginia Indian Heritage Trail. The Gulf Branch staff re-created an accurate dugout canoe. Built with modern power tools rather than the clamshells probably used by the natives, it famously sunk on its first outing. But onlookers can get the idea. The Arlington Historical Museum displays pottery shards found near the Potomac, plus various tools found elsewhere in Arlington. A stone axe was uncovered near the 16th hole of the ArmyNavy Country Club. Also exhibited is a souvenir of Arlington’s contribution to the 1957 statewide fair celebrating Jamestown, a scale model of a Potomac-side Indian village. That occasion clearly raised awareness of the native people’s heritage among the Arlington’s largely European-descended populace.

So let’s go further than simply deleting “the Skins.” When Arlington next debates street names, we should remember that nearly every main thoroughfare— from Glebe Rd. to Wilson Blvd. to Columbia Pike to the newly named Langston Blvd. — was paved on trails blazed by our Native American forebears. Let’s name one for the Necostins.

Preservationists are watching Richmond action on a bill drafted after last year’s rushed demolition of two historic Arlington homes, the Febrey-Lothrop house and the Fellows-McGrath house.

The legislation by Del. Patrick Hope (with a Senate counterpart by Chap Petersen) would give preservation activists standing in court to challenge demolition plans and give the county board more time to weigh whether to approve local historic designation status that protects selected homes.

Activists Tom Dickinson and John Reeder say the county board, facing protests surrounding those two homes, “bowed to the wishes of the developers.” Arlington County is “following the bill through the process,” a spokeswoman said.