Hi everybody, I’m new on the Planet - finally managed to get myself registered! After almost 4 years of lurking I guess it’s time to share my little story with you and apply to be officially enfanyuated. 17thFebruary 2018 changed the life of my whole family. We were following the Olympics, watching ski jumping, biathlon etc. And if it wasn’t for my mother who told me about the German gold ambitions in the pairs’ competition, we would have missed figure skating completely. Like we had in 2014. Although I had really enjoyed watching Kati Witt on TV with my mother back in the 80s.
German TV reported on the men’s event very early in the morning. (It was Daniel Weiß who also commented the popular Sportschau video of LMEY last year.) Luckily we had recorded it to watch it later that day. When they showed Yuzu’s face in the starting pose of Seimei, I was like: “Wow … who is that? He is strikingly handsome!” We saw him skate and nothing was like it had been 5 minutes ago. When he was fighting the tears in the Kiss & Cry, my teenage daughter and I had already fallen into the rabbit hole. When her dad got home we re-watched it all together and he shared our amazement.
My first emergency measure was to print a picture of Yuzu for my daughter’s room so she could look at him before going to sleep. Further, to her delight, I dumped our restriction of internet consumption. Instead of watching TV we switched to “YuzuTube”. (How crazy is it to watch a 50 minute press conference in Japanese if you don’t understand a word?) Why on earth hadn’t we discovered him during Sochi Olympics ?!?! Helsinki is not so far away - we could have gone to Worlds in 2017 !!!
Somebody must have heard me crying … When we read Yuzu was going to Helsinki Grand Prix I couldn’t believe it. The event even matched our school holidays! So I reorganized my financial priorities and started communicating online, getting invaluable support from other Yuzu fans and succeeded in buying tickets. (It wasn’t easy to get 3 decent seats side by side, though.) Anyway: It was the 1sttime ever I was looking forward to November - the greyest of all months. The 3 of us spent the best 4 days of our lives in Jäähalli. The atmosphere, the roaring applause like in a football stadium ...
Having avoided social media, I had never imagined to find such a nice community on the world-wide web. It’s so much fun reading that most fanyus do as we did - celebrate the anniversaries of Yuzu’s 2nd Olympic gold to drown once again in the emotions that overcame us so unexpectedly (not being able to sleep or work etc.). And now I can hardly bear the anxiety before Beijing. Who would have thought he’d be in a position to try to defend his title again? Even if that’s not his priority. At Helsinki GP, I recall hearing fanyus whispering: “The best is yet to come!”
If there was no Yuzuru Hanyu, my family wouldn’t be planning holidays in line with figure skating competitions. The 3 of us wouldn’t share this joy and excitement. There would be a big hole in our lives.
