How the ice trembled, Yuzuru Hanyu never forgot. Sometimes he told the audience about it, in his own way: dancing, floating and with images that he created from movement. He dedicated his 2017 World Championship freestyle to the victims of the earthquake disaster and tsunami in Japan. Likewise the gala program after the Olympic victory at the Winter Games in Pyeongchang. This short piece, “Notte Stellata” to music by Camille Saint-Saëns, is an elegy on skids. A lament without words that everyone in the world understands.
Hanyu was 16 years old and in the middle of training at the Sendai ice rink on March 11, 2011, when the ground trembled, he felt the ground bulge upwards and ran outside with skates on his feet. His family was briefly accommodated in an emergency camp, the parents’ house had become uninhabitable, the ice rink, like many other buildings, was badly damaged and destroyed. So many people, he said later, would have helped them back then, when nobody knew how to go on, when his own career was in the stars: “So I wanted to do something for them – and what I can do is ice skating. “
Nineteen scoring world records
From then on, Hanyu defined his sport for eleven years before he declared his competitive career over on Tuesday at the age of 27. In 2014 he was the first Olympic champion from Asia in men’s singles, the first since 1952 to defend his gold medal four years later, as well as two world champions and four-time Grand Prix final winner. He set world record points 19 times. But no number can express what this slim, quiet, introverted athlete also achieved: He enchanted the audience, touched their imagination.
When the music started, he proved that this sport, born of drill and discipline, can have a soul in its most beautiful, weightless moments. That art, even if it is figure skating, is always a matter of give and take. He understood his audience and his audience understood him. Hundreds of thousands cheered him on the streets of his hometown Sendai after his second Olympic victory.
His fans, called “Fanyus”, drew paintings for him and wrote poems, they flew halfway around the world to see “Yuzu” live, and sometimes camped in front of arenas to stand in line at the box office when the box office opened. Geographically, this shy young man is a rock star only in Asia, figure skating in general has lost much of its popularity. But there, after his performances, yellow plush bears smashed from the stands onto the ice, as if someone had opened the floodgates to bear heaven; in Pyeongchang, some spectators wore bear-ear hairbands to show their admiration for the performer, whose mascot is Winnie the Pooh. He donated sacks of cuddly toys to children’s hospitals.
Blade art in Beijing: Yuzuru Hanyu in his last competitive appearance in February.
(Photo: Wang Zhao/AFP)
“He has an aura, a special presence,” said Midori Ito, the 1989 world champion. Even the American Nathan Chen, who recently snatched the world title from him three times and most of the records, named him after his own Olympic victory in February in Beijing, probably not just out of politeness, the “greatest of all time”. Because Hanyu’s weightless art – part Artist, part Ariel the Air Spirit – was only one side. The other revealed itself in a competitive toughness and robustness that stood in spectacular contrast to a delicate, ethereal nature. Hanyu, who moved to Canada soon after the earthquake to train with former world champion Brian Orser, has also become the first athlete to compete with the quadruple Rittberger and has pushed himself to new heights in duels with Chen.
Even in Beijing, at his last competition, when he was almost hopelessly behind after the short program because of an accident with Salchow, he put his faith in everything and risked a world first: the quadruple axel, the only jump in which even four and a half turns around its own axis are necessary. The attempt ended in a fall and is now credited with an asterisk as unfinished in the figure skating style bible. Hanyu finished fourth at the 2022 Winter Games behind Chen and two young Japanese colleagues.
Chronology of a premiere: The sequence shows the unfinished attempt by the quadruple Axels Hanyu in Beijing.
(Photo: Kyodo News/Imago)
Days later it was announced that he had started again with an ankle injury. In 2018 he tore the ligaments in his foot in a fall three months before his second Olympic victory.
But Hanyu hasn’t written off the quadruple Axel yet. He wants to continue to lead him to perfection – even after the end of the competition. Because his life as a figure skater, he said at the press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, is not over yet. From now on he wants to appear in shows without being subject to the judgment of judges: “I want people to see how I keep fighting.” He feels that he can still give people a lot. “I’m not sad at all,” said after a deep bow in farewell as he left.