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- After losing his parents in a plane crash that claimed the lives of 67 people in Washington last year, figure skater Maxim Naumov hopes he has done enough to honor their legacy.
- Naumov finished third at the U.S. figure skating championships, but it remains to be seen if he will represent the U.S. at the Milan Cortina Olympic Games.
- Ilia Malinin won his fourth consecutive U.S. title, dominating the field and finishing 57 points ahead of silver medalist Andrew Torgashev.
ST. LOUIS — Vadim Naumov told his son to be resilient. To be strong. When he last spoke to his father, Maxim Naumov had no idea just how much he would need to embody those words.
Less than a year after his parents died, along with 65 others in a plane crash on Jan. 29, Maxim Naumov claimed his first medal at the U.S. figure skating championships on Saturday, taking bronze to put himself into the conversation for the Milan Cortina Olympic team.
The 24-year-old who finished behind four-time U.S. champion Ilia Malinin and two-time silver medalist Andrew Torgashev finally snapped a run of three consecutive fourth-place finishes at the national championships. Malinin, the favorite to win Olympic gold next month, ran away with the national title by a margin wider than 57 points and can wait comfortably for Sunday’s Olympic team announcement.
Naumov and Torgashev are on the bubble for one of the three available positions.
But considering what Naumov fought through to reach this point, he is not sweating a simple announcement.
“I came into this competition thinking how grateful I am to even have the ability to compete,” Naumov said. “The fact that I overcame so much, looking back even not being able to lace up my skates and not knowing I was going to even compete, let alone skate, what I did today is just, I don’t even have the words honestly. … So when my head touches that pillow, I’m just grateful. I’m grateful I got two arms, two legs. I’m thankful, and it’s in God’s hands.”
Naumov and Torgashev moved onto the podium after several other contenders stumbled Saturday. Two-time Olympian Jason Brown entered Saturday’s free skate in third but botched nearly every jump of his long program and tumbled to eighth. Tomoki Hiwatashi slipped from second after the short program to fifth after also struggling on several jumps.
Naumov stumbled on each of his first three jumping elements, but fought for every fraction of a point on the ensuing skills. When he failed to connect the planned quad salchow-double toeloop to open his performance, he tacked on a double toeloop to a triple salchow later in his program to claw back extra points.
Sitting in the kiss-and-cry while waiting for his score, Naumov held a baby photo of him sitting on his father’s shoulders next to his mother.
Three-time world pairs skating medalists and two-time Olympians Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova were the only skating coaches their son had known. After Maxim finished fourth at last year’s U.S. championships, his father had already started planning out how they could push to make the Olympic team in 2026. It was one of the final conversations they had as a family.
“We have to be strong and resilient,” Naumov said of his father’s message. “And that’s exactly what I’ve been carrying through this entire season. It’s not been perfect, by any means, but this is exactly what I think about very frequently, is those exact words that night, and I try every day to do that.”
Torgashev was one of the few competitors in the final six-athlete group who performed a clean free skate. Even Malinin stumbled on his last jump and put his hand to the ice. Torgashev dropped an imaginary microphone for his ending pose, then doubled over before dropping to a knee as the crowd rose to its feet. He held his head in one hand in disbelief and pumped his fist to the crowd.
Amber Glenn secures her place at next month’s Milan Cortina Olympic Games by beating Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito for the U.S. figure skating crown.
“I accepted a little while ago that regardless if I can call myself an Olympian or not one day, I think the Olympic spirit is in all of us,” Torgashev said. “It’s this resilience, this drive, this tenacity, that brings us all coming back to the rink every single day.”
Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who won their record seventh consecutive U.S. ice dance championship, are locks for their fourth Olympics as a pair. The duo who helped the United States win a team gold medal in 2022 is still looking for their first individual Olympic medal after dominating every other major competition.
The three-time world champions and three-time Grand Prix Final champions broke their tie for most U.S. championships with Meryl Davis and Charlie White, the 2014 Olympic gold medalists who won six consecutive national titles from 2009-14. With their “Paint it Black” free skate, Chock, a Redondo Beach native, and her husband Bates finished almost 15 points ahead of silver medalists Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik.
Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko, who were the second-best U.S. team in the 2025 world championships, took bronze.
Americans have won ice dance medals at five consecutive Olympics, and, for the first time since 1988, could have back-to-back men’s singles gold medalists. After Nathan Chen’s championship performance in Beijing, Malinin is expected to dominate in Milan. The 21-year-old hasn’t lost a competition since 2023.
The man known as “The Quad God” played it safe Saturday by performing just four of the famous quadruple-spinning jumps and leaving out his signature quad axel that only he has ever performed in international competition. In December, he became the first person to perform seven quad jumps in one program. No other competitor Saturday attempted more than two quadruple jumps.
