Xen

The closest I've had to Yuzu was probably Sasha Cohen, but financially I was certainly not able to follow her around. She did inspire me to work my tail off on spirals and spins though. After Yuzu stops competing, I am sure another skater will attract my attention, but perhaps with less intensity and it will be a while before such a skater shows up in the men's, slim pickings there. Ladies maybe a higher possibility.

Not surprised by this, even extroverts need breaks from people, and Yuzu strikes me as an introvert, just a very people loving introvert. So that level of attention must be exhausting, needing to be on best behavior all the time because you never know when a camera might capture him. As for fan burden, it is love and support but also expectations. Mentally, he probably knows that fan support is unconditional love, but emotionally there muzt be some frustration and fear he does not meet fan expectations when he skates less clean. I know this is a sterotype, but the idea of unconditional love and support outside of your family is such an odd concept in asia, we compete like crazy starting even in kindergaten now, and as a child sometimes you even doubt the love of your parents due to the competitive pressure that they even add. So while Yuzu gets it intellectually, I wonder if he fully believes it all the time. For his.sake, and my peace of mind, I hope he does. I also suspect he is aware of some of the fanwars, and attack towards his fans, if nothing else just because that happens to all large fandoms when competition is involved. And I imagine he might feel bad that such a thing exists, but he also cannot do anything as that would make it worse. I think as fans, so long as we respect his privacy, and respect his decisions, it should be fine. There is not a whole lot we can do anyways, and I think he has come to accept the attention, poohs, banners etc at competition. If his fans actually spread the love of skating and general knowledge of skating, I think he would be happy too.

might not be published? I doubt they publish all their data.

depends, I mean he wants to bring Nessie into this world at some point, question is whether 18/19 or 19/20. So maybe the 4Lz3T has to wait its turn.

Xeyra, Perform live is a company that records and does frames analysis to measure jump height, distance, angles and airtime. In fact the earlier Javi vs Sergei 3A comparison was from them. They have videos of a lot of skaters here: http://perform-live.com/blog/video-analysis-of-figure-skating.html and they also give quite a bit of video analysis and the articles also mentions why it seems skaters are having certain problems with their jumps.Go check out their updates on Rika's 3A, she can eat a couple guys live in 3A distance and flight time. But I would probably trust their stats quite a bit more than the russian jumping stats. If he has more flight time than even Boyang, then all I can say is WOW Yuzu, wow. And also, no wonder his landings are so far not that stable. Lastly, he has enough speed on exit the could probably push that momentum to add in a 3T next season, if he wanted to. By the way, Dartfish is an app that a lot of top skating coaches seem to use to do video analysis. And if anyone is interested, this is their analysis of Yuzu's GPF16 4Lo. It's quite technical, and you will get the magic of the pattern99 huge toe picks at work. But it's an interesting read for any of the more technical minded: Yuzu's 4Lo analysis Hah, and based on the blade size listed...Yuzu is a size 395 in edea boots. Anyone trying to get him pooh shoes as souvenirs now?

I guess Brian's going bald next season.

might not, I think delayed rotation is just that he snaps to rotate later in a jump. But that he does it and needs to do that for this jump already says something.

Yes, there was one. And there is a blog by a guy measuring air time and translating airtime to min height needed per jump. Granted his numbers are outdated and he had a small sampling size. But the method should be perhaps a bit more sound: min air time translated to min height Frames translated into min air time Roughly speaking, a 4T would require about 54 cm height, and 3A is about 49-50 cm minimum to be safe. And a 3Lz would require around 35 cm height to clear minimum, I can see that 4 Lz would probably need well over 65 cm jump height (the coach actually says that from 2lz to 3 Lz you have to double the jump height, so I'm not sure if it's needed again to go 3lz to 4lz, but I don't think Nathan has 70 cm yet).

There are coaches in my city who are Yuzu fans, I know who they are, it's just a case of catching them since they're gone for local competitions all the time. TAT And there are 2 girls, one in UK and one in Australia, who are getting their swans over Xmas break when they come home for vacation.

Eh....I already gave out 12 swans in China. Yesterday we had a group lunch and even the guys at my rink each took a swan home. =)

Chill, if it were to happen, the website would have already been down. It seems that the little boy that kept on trying to reach Yuzu was Plushy's son? I heard that in the CBC video of Yuzu's FS.

No really, I mean it not in the sense of Yuzuru fans in China will go after CBC, but that Chinese netizens might get pissed off even if they never follow FS in their life. =( Welcome to China...next time I'll tell you about the "internet body-search" and stuff. It happens less now in China, but hey it can go nationalistic. But that article-Canada, I expected better from you.

@CBC: please take it off your damn website. Right now you are seriously lucky that figure skating is such a small minority sport that Chinese Netizens haven't started hacking your website. If this were a sport that was super popular in China and you do that to a Chinese fan, the flames of nationalism will be fanned and I don't think you'd like it. I mean, if someone in China really went viral on this, and how you are insulting a Chinese fan, I don't know if you'd survive. But seriously, wtf-and Carol and Kurt were so awesome in the TV broadcast of Yuzu's program.

Nah, he'd be more subtle, it'll be buried within the center of the seimei star on his back.

Will his perfectionist kuyashii self allow him to do so? Is the consistency he is talking about really the same consistency that the media is talking about though?

Uh, have you ever heard of eyelids tape?

Xeyra! I was trying to keep people's expectations down. T_T I think if Yuzu skates every SP clean, it's going to be WR or near WR each time, since the 4Lo has a higher BV than his 4S. But I don't disagree with your math-clean Yuzu honestly slays everyone within range on GOEs and PCs. He just needs to skate relatively cleanly and let the math do the work. Speaking of which, if you don't mind me asking, given Yuzu's GOEs and PCs scores, if he doesn't get 1st place after SP, how many points does he need to stay within to let his GOEs and PCs do the work in the long? Assuming he and everyone else has their normal scores on both and go clean? @Geo1: but you watched ACI chopin live and he kind of...slayed it there, so no jinx really... I should probably apologize more likely because I've been letting out more crazy stuff into the universe...like yolo 4Lz2Ts.

*sigh* I need to get up in 5 hours to go practice. So sleep deprivation means tomorrow I probably won't practice jumps. But here goes. Summary: 1) realistically, let's not expect Yuzu to win SP each time. If he skates squeaky clean maybe, but it's highly likely that he'll sit behind one of the sQuadsters in the SP later on in GPF and at Olys. Before people panic about what I released into the world-I still think he can win, but he'd have to go WR breaking mode. But top 3 is definitely easily doable for him. 2) Seimei and Chopin were smart choices, regardless of whether we wanted new programs or not 3) Like it or not, 4Lz was going to come and will probably stay. And it is quite critical that he add it this season. And I think his goal is to dominate in the long. So there, everything is to achieve that goal. Reasoning: Now to sleep I go.

Well at least they capitalized the P, or it would be worse. C'mon John Wilson blades, spelling errors? @gladi: Thank you, incoming Pooh cupcakes (see I didn't spell it wrong unlike a certain blades company)

I think other than what was stated, the other issue is just perception of men's skating and women's skating in general. Women's skating has not changed that much for years, but men's skating has been quad happy for a while, and is viewed as exciting due to how many quads just got added in the span of less than 2 years (Boyang's 4 Lz anyone? when before it was mostly 4S and 4T). For ladies, the game has always been about consistency and artistry, as the technical content overall just does not vary that much, and more ladies are remembered for their artistry than technical muscles (though they had to be consistent). So even though backloading is harder, because it's triples it's not viewed as that revolutionary. Whereas for the men, frankly the number of guys who wowed us artistically probably is just not that many-it's usually a game over the technical muscles. So perhaps Janny is not that "impressive", versus say Yuna, Mao, Sasha Cohen or even Michelle Kwan, is because we normally expect more artistically from our ladies. This is something she'll probably improve on over the years. While with the men, we've had lowered expectations on the artistic front for years, so when a more artistically inclined guy like Yuzuru can deliver the artistry with the solid technical content, we are more impressed.

Someone want to hook her up with Max? She'd probably enjoy him. =) I'm not sure about Jackie of the "messy tap/clean tap" line... Did she also forget Boyang? I'm more amused by how consistent Yuzu's jump height is. He's fairly stable, and it seems if you measure height with jump stability/success rate, the highest jumps are not the most stable (unless you are boyang and his 4Lz). So maybe Yuzu's 4Lz real issue is that it's taller than what he normally handles- so maybe he could just spin a bit faster and jump a bit lower at 65-68ish, and it'll stablize? Triples are always at 41+ CM even in combo (which is harder to gain height). And in terms of total height, translated is at 5th and absolute is 4th. Pretty impressive! Also looking at Jason Brown's stats, I'm surprised by his lower rps. I'm also amused that Shoma's height and rps are lower than Nate's.

Hmm, not necessarily. If you don't have enough distance there are also issues with axis tilt. I'm thinking of this video on youtube where they compare Sergei Voronov's 3A with Javi's 3A. The height is different from the article, but the video also gives a distance covered, and Javi covers more ground than Sergei. Perhaps that would explain the tilt. On the other hand, would the height of the jump also affect how easily it is for the jump to tilt off axis and cause an unbalanced landing? For example, to go higher you have to throw your body off balance a bit more to get it. Then there's the fact Yuzu has both good height and good rotation speed, which makes his 3A so stable- so perhaps he really can, as he said on that show, control his speed, height and distnace. Video btw:

Well let's fortify our hearts...one in case he does have an iffy landing, but also in case he goes iffy all practice on the 4Lz and lands a beautiful one in competition (and then we all die to the sheer beauty of the jump).

Was that the one he landed? The axis seems good. o_O

You know...geniuses, they're all kind of extreme like that. Or you know, it's a thin line between genius and insanity, so it's a thin line between a pop and a quad.