BOSTON — On the final day of the 2025 world figure skating championships in Boston, Ilia Malinin defended his title and cemented his place as the man to beat at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics .

Malinin, 20, was the last person to take the ice at TD Garden on Saturday for his free skate and landed six quadruple jumps en route to a dominant victory. The only skater in history to land a quadruple axel in competition , Malinin has not lost a competition in nearly 18 months and has now won two world titles in a row.

It's the first time the U.S. has won world titles in three figure skating disciplines at the same world championships.

That's in part because of what happened earlier Saturday. Madison Chock and Evan Bates won their third consecutive world title in ice dance with a magnificent free skate, finishing well ahead of their Canadian rivals, Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier.

Ilia Malinin did not achieve his goal of landing seven quads in the same program. But he did land six, something that only he has done before: Quad flip, quad axel, quad lutz, quad loop, quad toe loop and quad salchow.

The performance left Malinin exhausted on the ice, and NBC's commentators speechless on the television broadcast.

"That should not be possible," Tara Lipinski said on NBC. "It's like he undoes gravity."

In 2022, Ilia Malinin became the first figure skater to land a quadruple axel in competition. Nobody else has been able to match the feat since. And he did another one Saturday.

The take-off is what makes the jump so impressive. Because the axel is the only jump with a forward-facing take-off, the quad axel actually features 4.5 rotations rather than four.

If you followed along with Saturday's free skate, you might've seen Adam Siao Him Fa of France do a backflip near the end of his program and thought "wait... what?"

Yes, after years of being banned by the International Skating Union, the backflip has made a return this season. Siao Him Fa has been among the first to embrace it, as has Ilia Malinin. Prior to this year, backflips would be seen occasionally in the exhibition programs at galas following competition, but never at the competitions themselves.

As men's figure skating continues to shift toward the technical, and away from the artistic, Jason Brown continues to break the mold.

In a free skate without a quadruple jump, the 30-year-old once again showed the value of artistry and drew thunderous applause from TD Garden in the process. His free skate was strong enough to move him into the leader's chair, and left him near tears as he exited the ice.

It was a triumphant moment for Brown not just because of the home crowd, but also because of what he's been through this season. An equipment issue, which he's described as "the boot issue," hindered his performances and caused him to withdraw from nationals in January.

Nathan Chen, the reigning Olympic gold medalist, was one of three "legends" made available to members of the media ahead of the men's free skate Saturday. Chen graduated from Yale last year and is currently participating in a post-baccalaureate program in Baltimore for a year.

He said he still skates, but probably only once a week "on a good week."

"There's a rink that's like 45 minutes from where I live. On Fridays, we get out of class early, so that's where I'm at," Chen said.

Chen, who will turn 26 in May, never formally announced his retirement from figure skating. But when asked about Alysa Liu's comeback this season and whether he can envision making a similar return, he laughed.

"I mean, I'm in my program. I'm quite busy," he said. "I'm just trying to survive right now. We have two months before the (Medical College Admission Test) and I'm like, 'oh man, this is a lot.' But it's super inspiring what she did."

How's this for a throwback? More than six years before these world championships, Alysa Liu and Ilia Malinin posed for a photo together atop the podium after winning advanced novice titles at the 2018 Asian Open.

"The future is bright," U.S. Figure Skating wrote in a caption accompanying the photo. You can say that again!

If it wasn't clear already, it's certainly clear now: Madison Chock and Evan Bates will be the team to beat in ice dance at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

After years of going back-and-forth with Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier of Canada, Chock and Bates pulled ahead at last year's world championships and did the same again this year, wowing the home crowd with their jazz-themed free skate . They won both the rhythm dance and free dance en route to their third consecutive title.

As we enter the home stretch of the free dance competition, arguably no program has drawn more of a reaction from the TD Garden crowd than the Dune-themed skate by Olivia Smart and Tim Dieck.

The fiercely energetic performance, which featured costumes remniscient of the recent Dune movies, put the Spanish team atop the leaderboard with a score of 123.71 and left Dieck overcome with emotion on the ice. Smart and Dieck's program is one of six at these world championships that features music from Dune.

Meanwhile, the American team of Caroline Green and Michael Parsons closed their season with an emotional and elegant performance that brought a score of 114.96. They finished ninth. Compatriots Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko followed with an even stronger score, of 123.37 and placed fifth.

To put it briefly: They're significant. Without going into all of the nuances of the International Skating Union’s quota allocation system, skaters' performances here earned Olympic spots for their countries. And those countries will now decide who gets to fill those spots at the end of this year or early in 2026. A total of 83 quota spots were at stake across the four disciplines at worlds.

While nobody was technically punching their own Olympic ticket in Boston, there are many cases where that was more or less the case.

Ilia Malinin, the 20-year-old defending world champion from Vienna, Virginia, had a three-point lead going into Saturday's free skate after a near flawless performance in the short program Thursday.

Skating to the song "Running” by American rapper NF, Malinin breezed through his three jumping passes − including a quad lutz-triple toe loop combination. The crowd at TD Garden started cheering about 15 seconds before his program even ended.

The portions of the world figure skating championships that were televised on NBC or USA Network will have many of the usual broadcasting voices. Terry Gannon handled play-by-play duties, with Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir offering color commentary. The telecasts also featured Gabriella Papadakis, a 2022 Olympic gold medalist, as an ice dance analyst, with Andrea Joyce and Adam Rippon as reporters.

Here are the final results of the 2025 world figure skating championships.