Figure Skating World Championships in Prague: Americans Are Within Medals' Reach After Olympic Disaster

The ISU World Figure Skating Championships in Prague end March 29. After disappointing Olympic results, Americans Amber Glenn and Ilia Malinin have something to prove. Here is the full story.

The 2026 ISU World Figure Skating Championships, hosted in Prague in the week following the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, serves the specific function that season-end world championships serve in Olympic sports: a chance to correct the narrative. For Amber Glenn and Ilia Malinin — the two American skaters who carried expectations into the Milan-Cortina competition and came away with results that the skating world describes with the particular gentleness it reserves for disappointing performances from talented athletes — Prague is the opportunity to reassert.

Amber Glenn's Olympic result — a fall on a triple Axel combination that had been reliable through the entire season — will not define her career. It will feature in every article written about her for the foreseeable future, which is the specific way that Olympic moments attach themselves to athletes regardless of whether they represent the athlete's actual level. In Prague, after the Olympic programme and its emotional weight have been processed, Glenn has been delivering the skating that her coaches and supporters knew she was capable of: clean, committed, emotionally articulate performances built around the specific combination of technical ambition and artistic expression that makes her one of the most interesting skaters of her generation.

Ilia Malinin's situation is different and in some ways more complex. The jump content that Malinin brings to competition — quad Axel, multiple quad combinations, the densest technically demanding programme of anyone currently competing — should guarantee medals at every major championship. What has occasionally prevented those guarantees from being realised is the specific challenge of the Olympic Games' emotional environment, where the accumulated pressure of a four-year build-up, the arena atmosphere, and the awareness of global television audience produce performance conditions that technical training alone does not fully prepare for.

In Prague, on familiar competitive territory without the Olympic amplification, both skaters have been executing at levels closer to their actual capability. Whether that produces medals depends on the performances of their main rivals — the Japanese, Russian exile, and European skaters who populate the top of competitive figure skating globally. The world championships serve as both a conclusion to one season and the opening statement of preparation for the next four-year cycle.