Yuzuru Hanyu, the two-time Olympic champion, stated on Tuesday that he would now not take part in competitions, and the panorama of the game of determine skating won’t ever be the identical.
To get an concept of how a lot he has meant to his sport for the previous dozen years, think about a number of the followers who watched him compete on the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.
In a single nook of the world, three generations of Hanyu followers — a teenage boy, his middle-aged mom and his gray-haired grandmother — sat on the sting of their seats, straining for a glimpse of him. They wore fuzzy Winnie the Pooh hats that made them look as if they’d strapped big stuffed Pooh bears to their heads, and so they all clutched Pooh bears they deliberate to throw on the ice after his efficiency.
Dotting the stands have been a whole lot of followers similar to these three, all sporting Pooh gear and on a paparazzi-like mission to observe Hanyu’s each transfer. In skating circles, these followers are referred to as Fan-yus, and the bears they throw onto the ice are Yuzu-Poohs, cute and snappy proof that the cult of Yuzuru Hanyu took figure-skating fandom to a stage by no means seen earlier than.
There’s a purpose followers have been obsessive about Hanyu, 27, and commenced sporting Pooh-themed gear after they first noticed him with a Pooh-themed tissue field on the rink in 2010, the yr he turned junior world champion and began his march to the highest of the game.
Together with his fortunate Pooh bear perched someplace within the rink, Hanyu carried out with a uncommon mixture of grace and energy, skating throughout the ice as easily as a gently flowing river earlier than rocketing into technically troublesome jumps that made his opponents gasp in admiration.
He was equal components Evgeni Plushenko (identified for his leaping) and Johnny Weir (a grasp of artistry). Emulating two of his skating heroes made Hanyu arguably essentially the most well-rounded skater within the sport’s historical past. His purpose was to attraction to all folks, not simply die-hard skating followers or followers from his house nation of Japan, and he succeeded.
Hanyu pushed the game ahead with strikes and accomplishments that challenged conference. When he received the gold in 2014 on the Sochi Olympics, he turned the primary Asian man to win an Olympic gold medal in determine skating and, at 19, was the youngest winner because the American Dick Button received gold in 1948. In Japan, he turned probably the most well-known athletes and has remained a famous person and cultural icon there.
4 years later, on the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Video games, when Hanyu received his second Olympic gold medal, he turned the primary male skater to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals in 66 years, after Button’s second Olympic win in 1952. Although the American Nathan Chen was presupposed to be Hanyu’s hardest rival at these Olympics, that head-to-head battle disappeared after Chen stumbled within the quick program. Hanyu was the clear winner, and Chen continues to acknowledge that.
“It’s been the honour of a lifetime to have been capable of stand on the identical ice as Yuzuru Hanyu,” Chen stated Tuesday on social media. “Thanks for all the things you will have executed for the game, and all the things you’ll undoubtedly proceed to do for it.”
Hanyu’s résumé is stellar, together with breaking world report after world report for factors, profitable seven medals on the world championships and changing into the primary man to land a quadruple loop in competitors. However his followers gravitated to him for his intangibles, too. He didn’t simply skate to win. He skated as a result of he liked it, and his ardour for the game got here by way of.
On Tuesday, wanting calm and professing that he was not unhappy in any respect, Hanyu introduced at a information convention that he would now not compete as a result of he doesn’t must “search these sorts of evaluations.” He proved that on the 2022 Beijing Video games.
After rotating solely as soon as in his first quadruple bounce in his quick program at that Olympics, Hanyu was in eighth place. Whereas he may have performed it protected within the free skate to attempt to win a medal, he did the alternative by making an attempt to grow to be the primary individual to land a quadruple axel in competitors. He got here near touchdown that axel however didn’t — and the followers gasped in unison when he fell. He completed fourth total and, for the primary time in three Olympics, left empty-handed.
Hanyu’s aggressive profession is over, however don’t assume that he’s retiring from the game. At his information convention on Tuesday, he was cautious to not use the phrase retirement, explaining that he merely doesn’t just like the sound of it. He promised to maintain skating and striving to excellent new abilities.
“I wish to hold difficult,” he stated. “I wish to land the quadruple axel in entrance of all people.”
And if he does land that elusive bounce, lastly, there’s a very good probability that a military of followers might be poised to witness it.
To have a good time, they’ll rain Pooh bears onto the ice, as they all the time have. And simply as they did when he received his Olympic medals, these bears will flip the rink’s glassy white floor right into a subject of fuzzy gold Yuzu-Poohs to honor the most effective skaters ever.
