The Olympian's thin, silver-edged skates sliced up into the air in a rare, sensational backflip — one leg, then the other — landing on a single skate a split second later that shaved back into the ice. The audience, first stunned, then thundered applause in awe. That was not at this year's Milano Cortina Winter Olympics , however, and the athlete was not the young U.S. figure skating phenom Ilia Malinin . It was a generation ago — six years before Team USA's "Quad God" was even born — when the