shanshani

I think Origin would have worked better as an EX or SP too, the music doesn't really seem suited to creating a program where the skater has to land 4+ quads because of how intense it is. It seems to demand faster and more energetic skating throughout most of the program without too many pauses, and as a consequence I think Yuzu often ended up seeming a bit slow for the music due to having to conserve energy for the jumps.

as someone who can only do up to 1T/1S, I am in awe of everyone who can even do single axels LOL. well, at least I can turn to Yuzu for inspiration when I eventually try to get my axel. I mean, if he can throw himself at the ice trying to rotate 4.5 times, I can do the same for a piddly 1.5 rotations

why is it always like this every time I want to think "oh, he's looking in great shape, maybe he's healthy for once" it turns out to be far from the case at least we know his ankle isn't in bad enough shape to be impacting his jump landings. we can take comfort in that at least

I wondered for whether they deflated Nathan's scores a bit for the same reason--preordained winners are extremely boring, and Olys is the big chance to gain more viewers, so you don't want to give that up by having a pre-ordained winner. Wonder if Yuma is a factor here as well. They probably want to set him up as an up-and-comer who could challenge the established top of the field, but that's a pipe dream unless Nathan's scores come back down from the stratosphere. It's still quite unlikely even if Nathan continues to be scored as he was at Skate Canada, but it does at least make possible the scenario where Nathan makes a mistake or two and Yuma upgrades his layout, has the skate of his life, smashes his PB and beats him. Although it doesn't particularly bode well for Yuzu either if they're trying to set up Yuma--but JNats does indicate that Yuzu does have JSF's backing for this season, so that's good at least. Could also be that because Nathan had such a disaster at Skate America it impacted the judges' perception of him.

I think that's true too. He's using it to put pressure on himself, which helps him achieve his goals. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the main point of saying it. But I don't think the comment is purely a way of psyching himself up. It does have a basis in reality. Like I don't think it's literally true. There are scenarios where he can win without 4A, and of course he knows this too. However, they involve either Nathan messing up or placing an uncomfortable amount of trust in the judges, both of which make the result out of his control. 4A is the only way that he can proactively cinch his own victory without relying on outside factors (within reason--obviously he still has to trust that the judges won't completely screw with him). Yeah, I think this is exactly right. The 4A isn't really all that much better than the 4Lz in terms of BV, but it is a powerful weapon for shaping the narrative. By emphasizing the 4A as his tool for winning Olys, what else does Yuzu accomplish? Well, suddenly all of the news coverage is going to be about "will Yuzu land 4A," "2-time Olympic champion considered by many to be the GOAT promises to land the crazy jump no one has ever successfully done," and the expectation that will be created is that if he lands it, he'll win. That itself is going to put pressure on the judges not to deny him the win if he lands it. Much of the scoring has been so transparently incompetent and corrupt that basically no one denies it at this point, so if they still refuse to give it to him they risk triggering another scoring scandal, especially since there is absolutely no credible argument anyone could make about Nathan being the more artistic skater. That being said, the judges may ignore public opinion. Still, it does mean that Yuzu is effectively setting up the ISU to experience quite a bit of backlash if he lands 4A and they don't give him gold, especially since he will be the biggest story of the Olympics. (For a lot of different reasons--obviously his popularity, plus the 4A story is inherently compelling, but there are also some less obvious ones like the fact that he is a Japanese athlete who is beloved in China, which is noteworthy and symbolically significant given the history of CN-JP relations.) Not sure he's really thinking about it that way, but it's a funny thought. Maybe Yuzu miming shaking off the blood from his sword at the end of Tenchi has a few more dimensions to it than it initially appears. Also, with the 4A, he basically turns Nathan's 5/6 quads into yesterday's story. The "will Yuzu land 4A" narrative honestly kinda shuts Nathan out of the limelight entirely lol.

Sure, but the thing is, I don't really see the argument for them scoring that way outside of pure and naked corruption. Nathan's scores at World's weren't GPF2019 level either and he was directly against Yuzu there (though they were more generous than his Skate Canada scores). Expecting the judges to score Nathan like they did at Skate Canada is probably on the optimistic side of things, but it's still more reasonable than expecting them to score him the way they did over 2 years ago, especially when those scores from over 2 years ago have no basis in reality. I don't exclude the possibility of pure and naked corruption, but at the end of the day there's no point in even worrying too much about strategy if that's what's going to happen. Just skate clean and let the scores fall where they will. The most important thing in that scenario is not to give them excuses and opportunities to rob you. There are a lot of points in GOE, and even very minor errors can have a significant impact on your scores, and judges have a great deal of discretion as to how much they can deduct for these kinds of flaws. (Yuzu probably lost ~1.8 points on the minor issues with the combo and 3A landings in the SP at nats, which is greater than the difference in BV between 4Lz and 4A, and that was with a friendly panel). Anyway, I suspect the reason Yuzu says that he needs 4A to win, other than him being a dramatic anime protagonist, is that he also thinks that the psychological impact of 4A on the judges is worth more than the 4A looks to be worth on paper. I also suspect that Yuzu has noticed that Nathan hasn't been scored as generously recently, and then his scores here were good enough for him to conclude the scoring was not going to present an insurmountable obstacle. That's one of the reasons why he's finally committed to going to Olys. But he also thinks that without the 4A, even with the current scoring trends, he can't trust the judges to give him the win even if he deserves it (note the 4Lo scenario has him and 5 quad Nathan very close). Therefore he needs 4A to seal the deal. And I think I agree with that analysis (or I'm just projecting my own analysis onto his words, lol).

I disagree. I don't think Yuzu needs 5 quads to win. Nathan's jumps actually haven't been scored as generously this season, and even if the judges get a little bit more generous as long as they don't go to 2019 GPF levels Yuzu can win over Nathan even if Nathan does 1 more quad, especially if Yuzu upgrades 3A2T to 3A3Lo. See: Assuming everything is landed squeaky clean, let's do an estimate of his score. Unfortunately Yuzu has only had one competition this season and it was nationals, so it's a bit hard to tell how international judges might score him, but if we look at his Nats scores, we see that: Average PCS (both programs) 9.74 Average GOE (jumps, excl. 4A<<) 4.07 Average GOE (spins) 4.20 Average GOE (steps/choreo seq) 4.96 This is probably a tad generous compared to international judges, so let's suppose that Yuzu gets 4 GOE per element and 9.7 per component. (Note that he could also have executed the 4T3T combos and the 3A in the SP better, and the 4A<< probably cost him a couple of points of PCS). That would give him the following scores depending on his layout: 3A2T & 3Lo 3A3Lo & 3F 4Lo 330.12 333.72 4A 332.92 337.08 Now let's look at Nathan. Nathan has been to two international competitions this season, but Skate America was a bit of a disaster for him so let's exclude that. Looking at his Skate Canada scores: Average PCS 9.28 Average GOE (jumps, excluding -GOE and one wonky 4Lz) 2.69 Average GOE (spins) 3.17 Average GOE (steps/choreo) 4.22 I rather generously excluded a 4Lz that got lower GOE due to axis/landing problems but still had positive GOE, which I didn't do for Yuzu's slightly flawed jumps. Even then, we can see that Nathan's average jump GOE was actually surprisingly reasonable that competition, given how stiff/unaesthetic his jump landings are, their lack of size, etc. I don't know if the judges have finally seen the light, or if they just didn't want him at Skate Canada any more because they want Yuzu and the $$$ his audience brings back, but let's not trust the judges too much. If we look at World's last season, his average jump GOE there was 2.95 (excluding fall), so lets round that up to 3. He also got 96 PCS in the FS for some ridiculous reason. So using 3 for GOEs for jumps and spins and 4 for steps/choreo (why), and 9.5 average components, we get these scores depending on Nathan's layout: 4Lz 4T3T SP 4Lz 4F3T SP 5 Quad FS 330.09 332.19 6 Quad FS 336.07 338.17 So if Yuzu keeps the Nats layout and manages to land the 4A nicely, then he can beat a 5 quad Nathan under these scoring conditions, although the margins are very narrow so in reality it may be a tossup. If he also upgrades to 3A3Lo, then he can a cinch a more definitive win over 5 quad Nathan (honestly upgrading 3A2T to 3A3Lo is actually more valuable than upgrading the 4Lo to 4A, but Yuzu is Yuzu) and is competitive with even 6 quad Nathan (who, mind you, has to land 4Lo). Note that even if Yuzu doesn't manage the 4A, if he switches back to 4Lo or 4Lz but does upgrade 3A2T to 3A3Lo he can still win over 5 quad Nathan. Overall, I feel like my scoring assumptions here were also fairly generous to Nathan--certainly much more generous than he deserves. 9.5 components, seriously? So if the judging is just a bit more reasonable, Yuzu can get a more clear-cut victory. Of course, if judges decide they're blind and want to screw over Yuzu instead then all of this is out the window. But there's not a whole lot Yuzu can do in that case. Overall, I think it's more important that Yuzu skates clean and gets high GOEs on every element, because that's where the points he needs to make up any BV difference with Nathan comes from. If he starts having bad landings because he runs out of stamina due to 5 quads, that ultimately is going to cost him more in GOE and PCS than the extra quad helps. I also think that there's a huge psychological component to judging that can't be captured by mathematical analysis, and that's actually the chief edge the 4A provides. The amount of points you're technically supposed to gain from landing 4A is ridiculously small compared to the jump's difficulty, but judges judge based on feelings, and landing 4A is really, really impressive. I think the impressiveness of achievements is part of why judges inflate Nathan's PCS so much (though obviously not the only reason)--landing 5 quads is impressive, and that feeling of being impressed is actually one of the biggest contributing factors to how they score PCS. So therefore, it's likely that landing 4A will be more valuable point-wise than it appears to be just based on the rulebook. Edit: Lol in the time it took me to write this essay there have been like 2 new pages of posts.

I would split comp and exhibition skate recommendations since the format for those is different and it might be confusing if you jumble them together. For the top 5 most iconic competition programs, I'd say: 1. Seimei (2015 NHK or GPF--Olys is good but a different beast and I generally prefer to recommend clean programs first) 2. Chopin (2018 Olys or 2020 4CC) 3. Tenchi (2020 JNats -- think she has to understand how the sport works before she can understand the significance of the 2021 one) 4. Hope and Legacy (2017 Worlds) 5. Parisienne Walkways (2014 Olys) This list is a bit less focused on displaying his full range of program styles though, and LMEY is probably a good recommendation for newbies since it's a crowd-pleaser. I also have to bring up R&J 1 (2012 Nice) because it's both a stylistic contrast from the rest of the list and the best program from his early career, if you want to give a career overview. I would skip Rondo just because it's only had one outing and therefore we can expect it to grow as a program (and maybe get another costume--not a huge fan of this one). Then for exhibitions, maybe list 3: 1. Masquerade 2. Notte Stellata 3. Hm, probably Hana wa Saku (2021 WTT) to maximize stylistic variation and give you a chance to explain about the earthquake, but I also really like Requiem and Haru Yo Koi. HYK also has the benefit of definitively shattering the yes-Yuzu-sometimes-wears-very-feminine-costumes ice lol Honestly he's made more progress with the current training setup. Maybe there are a few things he can access easier at TCC, but overall I don't see much reason to go back.

this is really neat. also it lets me check my work about Yuzu's step sequence composition and looks like I called almost all the step/turns right. Yay!

coach. unfortunately currently at my rink you are only allowed to skate if you have class, so I can't do much practicing on my own 1 hr/week of training for at least the next few months. kind of surprised that I'm still making decent progress with such low ice time

It just hit me that I can actually do a toeloop and salchow. They're not good, but they are in fact toeloops and salchows I can actually do something that has a BV 😂 I even did a 1S-1T...to be honest I kind of feel like toeloops are easier to do in combination, but that's probably because my inside 3 turns are still kinda bad so I frequently screw up the entrance 😅

hopefully the fact that he withdrew means he did develop the sense not to push his body through injury quite so much, and not that it was so serious he had no choice but to withdraw

I'm out of the loop, has he mentioned successfully landing it before? or is he saying this at a time when we have no idea how quad axel training is going?

I have this data if you want to skip the scraping part. I'm currently trying to write a webpage to run database queries so people could look at this data themselves, but as I have 0 experience in web design or programming it's kind of a slow process lol

I've also used figure skating scoring to teach myself how to program. Yuzu and I have something in common lol though in my case I'm tracking individual judges' scores

There is a lot of toxic nationalism and the ultranationalists are very loud, but I think a lot of people who only read foreign media wouldn't even conceive of Yuzu's popularity in China as possible. It's just annoying to me that the ultranationalists' opinions are the only opinions that make it onto the international stage. I don't really care about the ultranationalists themselves, other than that they should stop harassing athletes (and if they go after Yuzu after any point, I hope Chinese fanyus bury them).

the netizens in question aren't hating on Yuzu. there was some scoring controversy in gymnastics and some internet people got really nasty and started posting terrible things on the Japanese athletes' social media. international media started covering this, but they make it sound like other voices are negligible compared to the ultranationalists' I think some of Yuzu's Japanese antis are basically Japanese ultranationalists. or at least, I can only assume so, because apparently they say he's Korean? that's only an insult if you think there's something insulting about being Korean, which obviously there isn't, otherwise it's just a bizarre claim (well, it's a bizarre claim either way). Even though he puts in care and effort to represent Japanese culture on the international stage, I guess he treats people of other nationalities with too much respect for them basically it's the same types of people being nasty, all that changes is what country they were born in

do you have a link to one of the polls? unfortunately the hypernationalist portion of China's netizens have made it on the international news recently, and honestly Yuzu being super popular in China is helpful for demonstrating that the people writing nasty comments on Japanese athletes' social media don't represent everyone, despite how English language articles barely talk about people with other perspectives I feel like some journalists' heads would explode in confusion if they found out how popular Yuzu is in China, lol...after all the articles on Chinese netizens hating Japanese athletes, that's going to be a big shock to them On 4'33": Yuzu is the only skater who could skate to that and make it work. I think it would be actually interesting, because one really striking things about watching Yuzu skate live is how silent the arena goes. The silence itself is a really powerful part of the experience--so to extend it over the whole skate would actually produce an interesting result.

I'm not Japanese, but I am East Asian, and I agree that it's more accepted for men to show feminine aspects than it would be in, say, America, and I wouldn't call him gender non-conforming exactly, but I still think Yuzu is a bit unusual. Maybe Japan is genuinely different, but in China, there is still a loud contingent that looks down upon "feminine"-seeming men, and I've seen celebrities with "flower boy" (more androgynous/feminine) type looks that are popular precisely because of those looks still get visibly uncomfortable with being seen as too feminine. I'd also point out that other Japanese male skaters (or even East Asian male skaters) don't dress like Yuzu. They might wear flashier costumes than their North American counterparts, but they're still usually comfortably in the masculine or non-gendered part of the clothing spectrum. No one else is wearing sakura fairy-like costumes. So the post is right to say that there's more room for men to express feminine aspects as part of artistic performance, and that's one big reason why Yuzu doesn't face much stigma for his costume and program choices and doesn't read as gender-subversive the way he would in North America, but I still think that it takes a lot of strength of character--or plain immunity to misogyny--for a man to portray femininity to the extent he does even in his social context.

I'd prefer if Yuzu didn't have too much pressure and expectation heaped upon him at Beijing, should he choose to go. Even purely from a competitive perspective, I think going in as an underdog is psychologically easier than going in as the expected winner--something about the idea that it's yours to *lose* I think is really tough to deal with. Plus, Yuzu really doesn't have anything to prove--he's already had an amazingly long lived and decorated senior career, and while winning would be amazing, not winning doesn't really take away from his achievements or his legacy in the sport. Honestly, it's almost like a bonus round. That being said, we do know Yuzu can perform under Olympic pressure, whereas that's still a question mark for Nathan. Yuzu hasn't had a great skate going against him the entire quad for various reasons, and it is interesting that the one time Yuzu killed it in the short and Nate made a mistake, and that was just World's, and a very weird World's at that. Going in as the heavy favorite is by no means a guarantee, as what unfortunately happened with Simone Biles shows. Nathan getting a bunch of media hype might not be all that good for him--it certainly wasn't last time. (Also, I'm pretty sure Patrick Chan was considered a shoo-in for gold at this point in the Sochi quad, lol.) All I'm saying is, Yuzu winning isn't out of the question either, though due to the scoring, it is probably contingent on Nathan making mistakes unless Yuzu lands 4A and the judges finally grow some eyes. Again, it shouldn't be blown up into an expectation or anything, but the Olympic pressure getting to Nathan again while Yuzu puts out two good skates is not a wildly implausible scenario either. Really, restrained expectations for Yuzu and sky high expectations for Nate is good for Yuzu. Onto a different topic, I missed the discussion of this earlier, but I just want to say that one thing that really stands out about Yuzu in light of...recent events...is that he has never, ever to my knowledge behaved as though being seen as feminine is bad or shameful. He even once compared himself to onnagata, male actors that play female roles in Kabuki theater. Unfortunately, I think that can actually be a really rare quality in men--even many men who profess belief in gender equality and say they aren't homophobic (because even though gay men can have all sorts of gender expression, feminine man = gay is the stereotype, I guess) recoil or are at least weird or embarrassed about doing things perceived as girly, because somewhere in their minds, they still look down on it or are afraid of seeming gay, even if it's just subconsciously. Whereas Yuzu behaves like there isn't even the remotest question about there being anything wrong about being seen as feminine, nor any question that his female counterparts' athletic achievements are just as worthy of respect as his own. It's far beyond just knowing which words are politically correct to say. There's just such a total lack of misogyny in his behavior which I think is sadly really uncommon anywhere in the world.

it's definitely loads of fun and good exercise in fact skating is the only reason I manage to actually do an ok amount of exercise each week

lol I remember when I wrote a blog post laying out statistics on the national bias of judges, I also got a lot of freak outs and I think one or two veiled legal threats. this doesn't surprise me one bit

the minimum age for seniors in gymnastics is 16

if I could make my contribution I've been working on building a queryable database for judges scores. it's not done (specifically it's missing pairs/dance for 2021 worlds/nearly all of the senior Bs/wtt) but it has all major senior international competitions (with international panels--so not the weird GPs this season) since the start of this quad (2018-2019 season) other than the aforementioned. if anyone is interested, here's what I have so far: odb format, sql format unfortunately it requires a bit of technical know-how to work with, but if you know how to write database queries, there's enough data that you can see some pretty interesting things. for example, here's the output of a query I ran on how Russian judges have scored the top 10 ladies in the past quad. (Point_bias is just how many points they scored a skater above/below the judges' average in a segment, averaged across all segments that the judge judged. Positive points means a judge gave the skater that many more points on average per program, negative means fewer points.) as you can see, the russian judges are...very consistently biased in favor of russian skaters and against their competitors you can write all kinds of queries for other stuff as well. for example, I wrote another query for a list of which judges have historically been friendly to Yuzu and which haven't (go swedish judges lmao), another that calculates the historical national bias level of each judge, another that looks at how judges from former soviet bloc countries score russian skaters, and so on--you can pretty much answer any objectively quantifiable question about the judging you can think of with the right query (well, as long as it's at the overall score level anyway--the database doesn't contain the GOE/PCS breakdowns) anyway, I'm hoping to get the rest of the data in some time this month, and then make a user-friendly way for other people to query the database that doesn't require learning SQL (though it's not as scary as it sounds! I learned it through this project)

it's also notable how they underscore everyone else, even if to a lesser extent. So even if they "only" overscore their own skater 2-3 points per program (which is already 4-6 points per competition), if they also underscore their skater's competitors by another 2 points per program, it makes the overall gap 8-10 points over the whole competition