micaelis

I think Yuzu will likely be much the same physically. You can tell by the shape of his face that age will not radically redesign his physique. We know how Brian has put on weight, but if you look at Kurt Browning, roughly of the same generation, you'll see pretty much the physique Kurt had in his competition days (although his hairline has most definitely receded). The idea of Yuzu doing ice shows is I think valid, but Yuzu being Yuzu, he's very likely, I think, to organize a show of his own, basically creating something that represents his idea of what skating should be. John Curry tried that back in his days after he retired (after taking the Olympic gold in 1976). I really don't think Yuzu, given the magnitude of his achievements, would like to spend years of his life skating to someone else's tune. He'd like to be the one in charge, and with his reputation it would not be difficult for him to acquire skaters willing to be part of HIS show. Then, once age begins to take its toll, I can see him turning to coaching. He'd have no difficulty in lining up any promising young talents. Just some speculation on my part, but I think the important thing is the Yuzu after competition will not easily go the ice show route unless he's in charge.

I don't think they would have gone forward without consulting him. The worst thing that could happen would be a mixup with your number one Olympic athlete. I know how stupid bureaucrats can be, but I can't imagine they are that stupid. The picture of him with the young girl reminds me of that brief video from eons ago when the ice rink in Sendai reopened and this little girl, probably about kindergarten age or even a bit younger, approached him with absolute delight on her face. I assume they knew each other. Yuzu's greeting of her looked thoroughly sincere, even moreso when he pinched her cheeks affectionately, rather like he did with Shoma when he needed Shoma to smile for a joint photo that was being taken. I think Yuzu really likes young children, which is understandable since with his serious training being undertaken at a very young age and his competing all around the world at an age when most of his peers are in middle school, well, he never really had an ordinary childhood. I think that's why he likes children. They're experiencing something he never did.

I decided to raise a point over an issue that's been bothering me, mainly because of the news that Yuzu would probably not be going to Japanese nationals and because he didn't go to the GPF. I'm thinking it might be appropriate for the medal holders of the last season's competition to be automatically entered in this season's. Thus the podium finishers of the 2016 GPF would automatically be in the current season's. The same would go for the forthcoming Olympics, where Yuzu, Patrick and Denis Ten would be automatically qualified (that is if they were still skating competitively). The rest of the roster of competitors would be filled by those who qualified for this season's competition under the normal criteria. That would provide continuity for the events from one year or one Olympiad to the next. Remember, there would not necessarily be three individuals plus the others who qualified each time around. For instance, in this year's GPF both Shoma and Nathan were podium finishers from last year's. Had Yuzu been physically able to compete this year, the fact that he had not qualified (because he missed the NHK) by the normal criteria would not apply. He'd automatically be in, resulting in seven competitors rather than six. A rule like the one I'm proposing would mean that key competitions would have a full complement of competitors rather than just those qualifying by current practice. The GPF this year was notable for those who weren't there who at the season's beginning were expected to be there (Yuzu, Patrick, Javi and Boyang). A less drastic alteration might be that only the winner of the gold in the previous competition would be automatically entered so that he or she or they might 'defend' their title. Just a thought.

I agree here. If Yuzu misses nationals, which appears likely now, then going cold into PC is not very good. My betting is, then, that he'll go into 4C instead, actually for two reasons then. One, he needs one competition before PC to get him back into competitive mode mentally. Two, 4C is the only major competition he hasn't won. With that kind of incentive I think all of us Planeteers have a 4C in our near future. May this 4C venture be the one he finally grabs the gold in and the one leading up to his 2nd Olympic gold.

Nathan's margin over Shoma was just .50 points, that's just one-half a point. I consider it a tie, actually.

Greatest Of All Time!!!!!

I remarked in an earlier post that Mikhail was a potential spoiler. He is obviously the best of the current generation of Russian men. More importantly, if you look at his performance, he's strong on the PCS also. I don't particularly care about the music he's using for his FS, since he really doesn't come off as an Elvis sort, but perhaps that's because I'm American and old enough to remember the first time Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and remembers what Elvis, particularly in his rock-and-roll years (before he became a Vegas headliner) was. What is important, though, is that Mikhail does not seem to be infatuated with quads, as Boyang and Nathan are. He seems to be going for a program that has unity and totality instead of a number of quads strung together with some merely adequate moves between jumps. Shoma is following that same strategy so that at this point I feel Mihail and Shoma are pretty much in the same league. Mikhail, however, does not have Shoma's charisma, and no skater has the charisma that Yuzu has. As Kurt Browning remarked, Yuzu is the only skater who can stand on the ice doing absolutely nothing and have the audience totally in his grasp. Right now I think Mikhail has a valid chance to beat Yuzu if Yuzu makes enough mistakes, which we all know Yuzu is capable of doing. On the other hand Yuzu, when he's on top of his blades, leaves everybody else behind, oftentimes way behind. We are thus looking at PC with Shoma, Nathan, Boyang and Mikhail as the major contenders for gold against Yuzu. Patrick and Javi are in the hunt, also, but I think their fates rest more on the first four and Yuzu making mistakes and they not making any. So nationals are next up and perhaps Yuzu will be there (a question which is running rampant in this thread right now). He hasn't said he's not going to be there and I imagine there is a deadline for entries to be made (does anyone know when that is?). If Yuzu is there, then I think the competition organizers better have a whole battalion of flower girls and boys ready, or a Zamboni with a blade, because all those Yuzu fans, deprived of their hero through much of the season thus far, are going to bury the ice under a sheer mega-avalanche of Pooh toys.

I just pulled up the results of the GPF. Nathan Chen won, but Shoma was ever so close, being just .50 behind Chen. The intriguing thing is that their scores were much less than Yuzu at his best, at his second best, at his third best, etc. Just 286 points. If that's the best they can do in what is arguably the most important competition before the Olympics, Yuzu has some comfort. I will admit that their scores may have been lower because they were skating against the second-tier bunch. Had Yuzu and Boyang been there the challenge would have been greater and they might have been inspired to do better. I think, though, this indicates to Yuzu that nobody is skating right now to the degree that will be necessary if Yuzu is skating at the top of his form come PC.

Will he compete at nationals, or will he skip it? His Olympic perch is secure. He doesn't need nationals, not when he's currently the Olympic Champion, the World Champion and a four times Grand Prix Champion. Shoma also is guaranteed. The competition at nationals will be to see who's the third Japanese. My thinking is that for him nationals will be an opportunity to see how he matches up against Shoma and also to get him back into a competitive mindset. If he's not healed completely and not back to 100% he'll stay out. But if he's fully recovered, then he'll go. Remember, he's got the images of that twelve-year old's quads to put the fear of God into him.

There was a time way back when the chaps from British Eurosport were covering the Junior Worlds (2009 edition), when after seeing Yuzuru perform, remarked that they were glad to be covering the juniors because every now and then, as they remarked, 'you see the future', and they identified Yuzu over a couple other prominent junior competitors as being the future. Very prescient on their part. Right now, looking at this fellow, we are seeing the future, the next generation to come from TCC. I can't help but think, though, that Yuzu being a daily sight for this fellow, has been greatly responsible for the boy's progress. When you see someone else doing what is regarded as impossible, it makes it easier to do it yourself because you KNOW it can be done. So here we have a potential superstar by, I would say, Bejing 2022. I can't but think that Yuzu must have given him some personal encouragement. I'd just like to see this fellow in a full program, see what kind of PCS he might have. That is the element that gives Yuzu the edge when everybody else is doing as much jumping as he does, and that is the element that Brian has worked with Yuzu since day one at TCC.

As far as I can say, this is the largest blanket penalty ever in sport, where an entire nation is banned. True, there is the fact that individual athletes can elect to compete, although considering it's the Russian system involved there may not be much individual choice allowed. As far as historical precedent, the one I can think of, insofar as it was against an individual who had become an icon of his sport, is the penalty leveled against Lance Armstrong, where he was stripped of all his Tour de France wins when conclusive evidence was discovered that showed a systematic doping use over what seems to have been the entirety of his Tour de France career. In terms of the prominence of the penalized athlete, the Armstrong case, I think, remains the benchmark. In baseball there is another famous affair, though this was for gambling rather than doping, and that's the banning of Pete Rose, who was functioning as player and manager for the Cincinnati Reds at the time. Subsequently, as part of a rule made across the board for individuals who had been banned from baseball, as was the case with Rose, election to the Baseball Hall of Fame was also banned. Those are the two cases I can think of where the individuals involved had extremely high prominence in their sport. The blanket banning of Russia is unprecedented. What most intrigues me is how long will the ban continue. Will it continue into the 2020 Tokyo games and possibly beyond. In reading over the decision handed down I didn't see any indication of how long the ban was to extend. If anybody else knows the answer to that, please post the information. What does remain is that Russian sport tonight exists in a limbo quite simply of its own making. The rules about doping have been on the books for ages and all the evidence indicates that the Russian sports operations were geared to systematically circumvent those rules. As has been noted, it's the innocent athletes who are now suffering. One other point - this is not the greatest crisis the Olympics have faced. The 1980 boycott of the summer games in Moscow by the United States and its allies, and the payback boycott by the Soviet Union and its allies of the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles have cast a permanent shadow over the achievements by the individual athletes of those two Olympiads. All of this goes to show that politics is no stranger to the Olympics and to international athletic competition in general. There have been proposals in the past to remove all national paraphernalia from international competition, meaning no flags, no anthems, none of that. These proposals have essentially gone nowhere. What happens now as we approach PC we can only watch and hope. The difference between the situation this time and what occurred in the 1980s is that the initial boycott by the Western nations of the Moscow games was a response to Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and the boycott by the Soviets and their allies was payback for 1980. In short, the situation was precipitated by situations that had nothing to do with sport. What we have now is unprecedented.

Yes, he has. Just compare his earlier kiss and cries with the more recent ones. He's far calmer. Remember about all his bowing and rising and bowing to the audience when a really big score was racked up. We don't see much of that now. Is it just maturity or has he deliberately dialed back on his conduct. I really enjoyed his earlier kiss and cries. But now he is an icon for the sport so he has to have DIGNITY (Although we did get tears this year after his record FS at Worlds). I'd like to see the old Yuzu come back.

I've noticed this. In shows he's always the last to be introduced (saving the best for last) and always gets the loudest welcome. But it's apparent how much he gets into the choreographic chores he's sharing with the other skaters. I think it's because he's always skating alone in competitions and he loves the experience of being one of the crowd in the opening number. It's also apparent he's totally into the basically elementary choreography (it has to be elementary for all the competitive skaters to learn almost instantly). In the finales he's even more extroverted. I think, though, it's not only the being with the other skaters, it's his chance to directly interact with the spectators. Yuzu loves audiences. They are a large part of what he's become. His finger pointing skyward at the end of a truly successful skate is his acknowledgment (according to an interview of him I read) of the role of the audience in energizing him. The observation about extrovert and introvert is not wholly accurate, though. I think what we see as he stands there before beginning a skate is his sinking himself into his program, his preparing himself to become one with the moves and music about to commence. That's not quite an introvert. He is, however, reserved and I think cautious when not on the ice. That's not introversion but more a defensive measure because he's become such a public presence, particularly in Japan, but also wherever skating is front and center. He knows he is a massive symbol of his sport and he doesn't want to do any disservice to it. All in all, what we see at the ice shows and the gala is Yuzu allowing himself to be simply himself and not the skater out there racking up the points.

Is yuzu the only one who skates there? Look closely. Yuzu's on the cover of every book and magazine there. To answer the question, there are many others who skate there but I'd be willing to bet that once he retires they'll name the place after him. Yuzu has put Sendai on the figure skating map.

A little bit of trivia here - Jason Brown is just eight days younger than Yuzu.

It's beginning to look like the GPF this year is going to be more notable for who isn't there than who is, particularly for the men's event. No Yuzu, no Patrick, no Boyang, no Javi - That's four of the big six. Shoma will almost certainly win it but it will be more a win by default than a true win, a win that will have a fairly large-sized asterisk by it. That means there will be a lot more attention to the various national competitions, particularly the Japanese. If Yuzu skates there, and while I'm quite sure he wants to, I really wonder whether he should. Basically the season, as far as the men goes, is taking a vacation until PC. I think it will go down as a particularly weird season, a season highlighted, on the men's side, with inferior skating by supposedly world class skaters (Patrick and Javi here) and injuries (Yuzu and Boyang). Right now who will win at PC is a very open question because half the field is out of commission until PC itself. I bet the bookmakers are having a nightmare trying to figure the odds. Before the season started it was looking like the GPF would be a grand preview of what everyone would see in PC. Now there is no preview and it all boils down to PC itself unless enough skaters decide to go to 4C, but there we'd still be missing Javi and Patrick has said he's out until PC. So, everybody, with a brief look at things at Japanese Nationals (if Yuzu competes there), we are going to be kept in the dark until PC itself. I think this is becoming a season of utter strangeness.

Well, here we are at page 2015. Will we reach 3000 before Worlds, or before PC? Or even before Nationals. The way this thread moves I could see 3000 before the end of the year.

I know this is somewhat off-topic for this thread but the issue was raised and I think the person who wrote what I'm quoting here is misunderstanding the purpose of those credits that are supposedly not needed. Actually, they are. They comprise what one could call a well-balanced intellectual diet. At the time of one's life when one is finishing up one's schooling it is felt that the individual should have contact with a wide range of subject matter in order to avoid the tunnel vision that afflicts those who started specializing at too early an age and also to expose them to areas that just might arouse their interest perhaps to the point that they decide to go into that field. I can use my own experience to show that. I started university as a music major but ended up finally with a PhD in English. Obviously I changed my mind along the way and it was my exposure to literature that moved me away from music. So don't see those credits as useless. They just might open up a whole new vista for you, a vista that makes you decide that that's the particular landscape you want to devote your life to.

I'd love to see Yuzu add that spin to his armoury. It shows again his incredible flexibility, a flexibility that is probably the envy of most of the other male skaters. I've seen some other skaters try the Bielmann but their attempts are so pathetic it would be better they not try at all. Actually, though, there is a spin I think Yuzu could do that would really wow the crowd - go straight from a donut into a Bielmann. That would be absolutely incredible and it would be something I'd venture most of the ladies even couldn't do. That is one of the things I find admirable about Yuzu in his approach to skating. He's not afraid to think outside the box. The Bielmann, for instance, thought mainly as a move for the ladies. That didn't discourage Yuzu. There's a video of Yuzu back in his Novice B days doing a very good Bielmann when he's just nine years old. Then there are his programs. Over the years he's pursued quite a range of music for his programs, keeping it so that one could not say a particular type of music is what Yuzu skates to, unlike Javi, who's music is usually Spanish or movie stuff. So it is in that vid above, we see Yuzu attempting a new spin, much as I can imagine him undertaking to do a new jump. It shows Yuzu's innate curiosity, a curiosity and determination that has made him the one who is raising the sport to new levels and whose presence is so great that years from now these years will be known as the Hanyu years, just as the 2000s are the Plushenko years. Having an era named after one in skating doesn't mean a particular skater won everything in sight. What it does mean is that particular skater was the one constantly testing the limits of the sport. There's no other skater around this decade who has more consistently been the one doing that. Witness all those records. They tell all.

I can see about his foregoing the honor of bearing the flag come the closing ceremonies. I can REALLY see about the media storm and that's because figure skating has never before had a figure who is not only a superstar but verging on becoming iconic. At least Yuzu has experience in handling the media so for him much of the media storm will pretty much the same. Actually I wonder, if Yuzu doesn't get gold in PC, how the one who 'dethrones' the king will handle the media since there's no skater out there who has lived in a bubble the way Yuzu has since Sochi. If I remember correctly what someone remarked many, many pages ago, Yuzu is the only skater for whom security is a very real concern, thus Yuzu's very own 'Secret Service' detail. As for the fact he already carries the flag of Japan, that is evident every time he skates when the stands contract a case of 'Japanese measles' with a red-and-white rash everywhere you look. The question of retirement? I'm sure many of his competitors would like to see him retire. It would mean room at the top, but I don't think those who run skating competitions would like to see that, because Yuzu competing means a full house, although it also means hiring extra flower girls. The ice after a Yuzu performance tends to be rather messy. All in all, though, all this is revolving around what transpires during a mere seven minutes total come next February. It's hard to think how Yuzu has had everything these last three-plus years revolving around those seven minutes, since I'm sure after his gold at Sochi, even when standing at the top of the podium getting his medal, that he wasn't even then thinking of the words Arnold Schwarzenegger uttered at the end of one of his films - "I'll be back." Yuzu's every skate over the years since then has been about those seven minutes this February. The attitude he has carried with him all these years can be used to define 'determination'. What I'm thinking is if in winning the gold medal at PC, he might not already be thinking of making it a threepeat at Beijing in 2022. After all, he'll only be twenty-seven then. Plushenko was thirty-one when he started competing in Sochi, before his withdrawal for medical reasons. Some food for thought.

PAGE 1999!!! 2000 is imminent!!!

First, I was unaware of the importance the Japanese give to seniority. I was thinking how at the Rio Olympics it was Michael Phelps, who had sat out the other four Olympic opening ceremonies he was at, was voted by the other athletes to carry the flag. So I admit I was speculating without knowing all the circumstances there. Now, as to the closing ceremony, the way of operating, a way dating back to the summer Olympics in Melbourne in 1956, at the suggestion of a schoolboy all the flags came in in single file and then the athletes entered en masse, mixing together for the ceremony. Generally the formality at the closing is less intense and there's generally a party atmosphere prevailing. The only time I can recall that the party atmosphere just wasn't there was in the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage by terrorists and in the ensuing rescue attempt died. There was a pause in the games but eventually the games continued and the final ceremony proceeded, yet I remember watching it and seeing that while there was a general sense of festivity, there was also a sense that those involved were not really that joyful. I presume that will not be the case this Olympics and I can see that Yuzu could very well be the flag-bearer and would almost certainly be carrying the flag if he repeats as gold medallist. Perhaps Yuzu might sit out the opening ceremony. Does anyone know whether he participated at Sochi? In any case, if he does participate he will probably get more on camera time than the flag bearer as he will obviously be the most internationally prominent Japanese athlete there.

OK, something to think about. I've just looked at the schedules for the opening ceremony and the Team Figure Skating competition on that same day. The skating is done hours before the ceremony and there is no competitive skating taking place the following day. In an earlier post I had speculated whether the Japanese team might be led into the stadium behind the flag-carrier Yuzuru Hanyu. Someone said there was competition taking place the next day. Actually there isn't and the parts of the team competition that take place on the day of the opening ceremony take place in the morning, well ahead of the ceremony. Secondly it looks like the ceremony is rather stripped down since the duration of the ceremony at least officially, is supposed to come in just under two hours, which I think means the athletes will not be standing for the great lengths of time we've seen in many previous opening ceremonies that just went on and on. All this leads me to assert that Yuzu should be chosen to bear the flag and lead his teammates onto the field. Why? He is obviously the most commanding presence of any Japanese athlete going to the Olympics next year, plus he is the ONLY Japanese athlete in any discipline to earn a gold medal at Sochi. From my point of view the issue is a no-brainer. Yuzu leads.

Yes, that seems to be the case. But then there's what happened in Helsinki earlier this year. Kurt Browning for CBC made the observation that what Yuzu had just done in the free skate had resulted in 'a big picture moment', when, as he continued, Yuzu had given the judges 'no excuse for not going and throwing the book at him' and loading him up with extra points everywhere. That's essentially what happened also in 2015 in two competitions late that year. I think you might be overstating things a bit about unfair scoring since it's evident that when Yuzu is perfect the judges do respond. Remember, he's set twelve world records, eight of which involved breaking records he himself set. Also, only once has a record he set been broken by someone other than himself. That occurred in 2013 when Patrick broke his short program record. Yuzu responded shortly thereafter by reclaiming the record and then improving on it at Sochi. Any time a skater has topped one of his records it's always been after Yuzu has himself set a higher record. I really don't think the judges are too biased against him, since they obviously recognize quality when it's there, witness all those record scores. If the judges were ALWAYS working against him I really don't see how he could have set all those records. I think the judges set a higher standard for Yuzu for many of the same reasons Yuzu sets a higher standard for himself. He and they see him in the context of GOAT, the Absolute Champion. As Johnny Weir said one time when observing how Yuzu motivates himself. 'He's skating against himself. What's harder than that?' A thought just occurs to me that the judges might not be judging Yuzu on the basis of how he compares to his competitors but rather how he compares to what he has done and accomplished. It is actually rather a compliment that the judges have that higher standard when judging Yuzu and it is testimony to Yuzu that that seeming bias he encounters just prompts him to work harder. As far as I'm concerned, I prefer the situation this way, since it means that Yuzu has truly earned every point he has received, and that means that what we are seeing point-wise is a reflection of not how Yuzu has fared against the others but how he has fared against the Absolute Champion.

Things are a bit confusing. The thread advances so rapidly I long ago decided to get back into it on the current last page and maybe backtrack a page or two until I get some sense what the current concerns are. That being said, my sense right now is that there's some problem with reaching page 2000, which I figured we'd have done so by now, since I can remember one time reading page 1980, which is the page number I'm writing this on right now. So, no explanations needed. I'm just glad to know that my memory wasn't deceiving me. As for the other matter, Yuzu's birthday, well, I hope decisions can be made before December 7 rolls around. It would have been nice if the problem with pages was such that we could hit page 1994 on 12/7. A nice coincidence there but I imagine by then, which is over a week away, we'll have passed the magic 2000. As for his birthday greetings, it would be nice if something could be worked up physically, perhaps a thumb (flash) drive with messages from all those on the forum wishing him a happy birthday and telling him he has our back as he gets back on the ice. I mention the thumb drive because it is something that should be able to be delivered by a forum member to the TCC to be passed onto Yuzu, perhaps even physically presented to him. We'd need somebody savvy enough to created a virtual happy birthday card to be put on the drive. Since it is becoming increasingly apparent that Yuzu is a techno-nerd (50 sets of headphones and majoring in a strongly computer-related field at university), I think he'd appreciate the novelty of a birthday card of that sort. And it would be probably quite different from what I anticipate will be a ton of Poohs of various sizes seeking his presence on that day. TCC might need some flower girls and boys of its own (just joking here). Slightly off-topic, I have an idea for a poll. I'm not good enough with this sort of situation to actually do it myself but I'm sure one of our moderators can set it up in less than five minutes. The question? Should Yuzu compete in Japanese Nationals? I think that might spark some lively discussion, also. So, that's it for now. I'm just glad to know I wasn't imagining that page 1980 several days ago.