Can Figure Skaters Actually Pull Off a Quintuple Jump?

When Ilia Malinin landed the first quad axel in competition—four and a half rotations in midair—he didn't just make history. He redefined what seemed physically possible on ice. Now skaters are whispering about something even more extreme: the quintuple jump. Five full rotations. Five.

Nobody's tried one in competition yet. A few claim they're training them, but claims are easy when your feet are on solid ground. The question physicists are asking is more interesting: is a quint even theoretically possible, or are we watching athletes chase something that violates the basic laws of motion?

NOVA's recent analysis suggests the answer might surprise everyone who's ever watched figure skating and thought, "That can't be real."

The Physics Problem

Here's what makes this fascinating from a pure mechanics standpoint: once a skater leaves the ice, the game is over. "You cannot add extra height. You cannot add extra velocity. You cannot add extra rotation rate. All of those things have to come at the launch," the researchers explain in the video. Everything—literally everything—depends on that split-second moment when blade meets ice and the skater explodes upward.

Elite male skaters currently get about 20 inches off the ground on their best jumps. Some, like Malinin, can reach nearly three feet. In the air, they're spinning at over 400 RPM—that's more than six rotations per second. To squeeze in a fifth rotation, they need to either jump higher, spin faster, or thread some impossible needle between the two.

The researchers ran the numbers. To hit a quint with current takeoff velocity, a skater would need to boost their rotation rate from 400 RPM to about 429 RPM. Alternatively, they'd need to get roughly a meter—about 39 inches—off the ice.

That second number caught my attention because it's not obviously impossible. NBA players and volleyball athletes regularly reach those heights. The difference? They're not also trying to rotate five times while maintaining enough control to land on a blade less than 5 millimeters wide.

The Angular Momentum Puzzle

The one thing skaters can control mid-air is their moment of inertia—basically, how much their body resists rotation. You've seen this if you've ever watched a spinning skater: arms wide, they rotate slowly; arms tucked tight, they become a blur. This is the same principle that governs everything from figure skating to neutron stars.

"As you lower your moment of inertia by bringing your arms in, you spin faster," the video explains. But here's the catch: "You put your arms out to help yourself balance. And as you pull your arms in, it's harder and harder to balance."

Elite skaters already have near-perfect air position. They're already maximizing this variable. So where does the extra rotation come from? The researchers think it has to come from the launch—more angular momentum generated in that critical moment of takeoff. "A little bit goes a long way on that speed," they note, which is both encouraging and terrifying.

Their conclusion: "I think the quint is within human capabilities. You have to get someone who has the explosive power of Michael Jordan, somebody who has extraordinary skating abilities. But if all of those things come together, yeah, I think we could see a quint."

The Landing Problem Nobody Talks About

Let's say someone actually pulls it off. Let's say they generate enough angular momentum, achieve sufficient height, nail the rotation rate. They still have to land.

Accelerometers placed directly on skaters' bodies measured the impact of a triple axel—three and a half rotations—at about 15 Gs. That's 15 times the skater's body weight. More force than an astronaut experiences at launch. All of it channeled through a blade edge you could hide under a nickel.

For a quint, we're talking about potentially even higher forces, absorbed by joints and muscles that are already operating at the edge of human capability. The researchers describe how the body acts as a "spring and damper system"—muscles tuning themselves to store and dissipate energy on impact. But there's only so much force human tissue can absorb before something breaks.

"Anytime you look at these extreme athletes, there's always going to be a risk of injury because you are really pushing yourself outside the range of normal operation," the video acknowledges. This might be the understatement of the physics analysis.

What Gets Lost When We Only Count Rotations

The researchers note something that's been bothering people who love figure skating for years: the sport's increasing skew toward technical difficulty at the expense of artistic expression. "For most of its history, those two aspects of the sport were weighted equally. Over the past 20 years, as the technical standard of jumping has gotten higher and higher, those base values of those elements has increased, the amount of value that the artistic side of the sport can achieve hasn't kept up with inflation."

This is where the physics analysis brushes up against questions physics can't answer. Yes, we can calculate whether a quint is mechanically possible. We can model rotation rates and launch velocities. But we can't measure what gets lost when the sport becomes primarily about how many times you can rotate before gravity wins.

There's also the health question, particularly for young skaters whose bodies are still developing. The video points out that "the more rotations you're attempting in the air, the greater the risk, but also of the longer term health consequences of the toll that this takes on the body and especially on young growing bodies." This isn't hypothetical—we're watching athletes push their bodies into territory that might have consequences we won't fully understand for decades.

What Happens After We Break This Barrier

The researchers checked the math on a sextuple jump too—six rotations. Their assessment? "That one I'm not sure we're ever going to see." But they said the quint was within reach, and now we're talking seriously about when, not if.

Maybe the more interesting question is whether we should be measuring human achievement by how close we can push to mechanical failure. The quad axel seemed impossible until it wasn't. The quint seems impossible until someone with the right combination of explosive power, technique, and possibly questionable self-preservation instincts decides to find out.

Physics says it's possible. Biology says it's going to hurt. The sport's trajectory says someone will try it. What physics can't tell us is whether landing a quint would represent the pinnacle of human athletic achievement or just another data point in our ongoing experiment with how much force the human body can absorb before it breaks.

— Nadia Marchetti