Team Japan

[sweetwater]

Ryuichi's comment on skipping JNats

https://www.instagram.com/p/CXgNNaJu6ez/

Spoiler

Thank you for always supporting us.
As announced by JSF, we are going to skip JNats.
I am very sorry.

 

We considered the risk of becoming unable to re-enter Canada after JNats and having to train without coaches for a long time and made this decision after consulting with JSF, our coaches, and our families.

 

Same as last year, we are grateful to JSF and the people concerned for understanding our situation.

 

We are very disappointed because we were looking forward to competing in JNats in this Olympic season as we couldn't last year.

 

We are going to work hard under our coach Bruno to be able to show our improvement in the next competition.

 

Thank you so much for your continuous support.

 

Ryuichi Kihara

 

[Guest turquoiseblue]

 

[sweetwater]

5 hours ago, turquoiseblue said:

 

2/2 is a mistranslation. It is coach Kagiyama (Yuma's father) who wants Yuma to master all kinds of quads except 4A next season and include quint in the 2023-2024 season. He sees such potential in Yuma seeing his 4T and 4S.

[Guest Mary_kyo]

Yuma is talented but in my honest opinion, he is not exceptional. Shun is on par with Yuma (actually I would say currently a little ahead, jumping wise), although the scores suggest something else for obvious reasons.

If I were Yuma’s father, I would help my son fix his disastrous 3Lz before going for 4Lz but he is choosing another ‘solution’, similar to what Eteri does.

It’s sad how Yuma can rely on only 4S and 4T to ‘dream’ about gold in nationals and Beijing because he is the JSF’s fave. Meanwhile skaters such as Shun should keep practicing and risking new jumps to be considered competitive. 

[Anni]

Fuji TV uploads every day videos of some participants at the JNats. Yuzu's broadcast is planned for 18th December.

Mai and Kaori 

Shoma Uno

Kana Muramoto & Daisuke Takahashi

Here you can also find some articles (Mana, Shun, Shoma, Sota Yamamoto, Koshiro Shimada, Taichi Honda)

https://www.fnn.jp/articles/-/286141

 

[Guest turquoiseblue]

2 hours ago, sweetwater said:

2/2 is a mistranslation. It is coach Kagiyama (Yuma's father) who wants Yuma to master all kinds of quads except 4A next season and include quint in the 2023-2024 season. He sees such potential in Yuma seeing his 4T and 4S.

 

Thanks for the correction. I hope he works on them because he wants to, not because his father wants him to... 

[KendallKlaire]

1 hour ago, turquoiseblue said:

 

Thanks for the correction. I hope he works on them because he wants to, not because his father wants him to... 

I've always had very mixed feelings on parents acting as coaches. Usually parents are involved anyway (helicopter parenting i.e. Vincent Zhou or Yuna Kim's mom) but I feel just having your parents as a coach adds more stress to training and the child-parent relationship. However, now that Yuma is receiving JSF support his father may feel Yuma can do anything (add more jump and, ugh, quints) and get ridiculous scores. I believe Yuma does love skating, but I can't help but wonder if his relationship with his father will remain so healthy (I'm just skeptical given recent developments with Alysa Liu and her father). 

 

I do think Yuma is a great talent and will take over the men's field once Yuzu and Nathan leave, but he does not deserve to score so high over other young Japanese men like Shun or Kazuki (my personal fav after Yuzu). The JSF favoritism is so obvious that it is hurting Yuma's popularity I think. From what I'm understanding from Japanese Fanyus on Twitter, Yuma is being pushed A LOT before nationals. 

[Guest Mary_kyo]

I have to add that I’m a supporter of “dreaming big” but not when the player hasn’t done any efforts towards it yet and just use it as a PR tool. It feels like a void bluff to me, not inspiring or admirable. Especially when the basic foundation for the goal is lacking.

Also it seems that a lot of figure skating fans (and now looks like the athletes/coaches themselves too) don't really understand the absurd difficultly of doing quints and how risky they really are (maybe because they never really tried them). On top of that, many can’t understand the big difference between landing a jump in harness vs in competition with telegraphing vs in competition without affecting the flow of a program. These three cases aren’t comparable at all. Just because someone is rotating fast, doesn’t mean they can easily add another rotation too, there is a whole lot more to it. 

 

Edit: Honestly, I’m disliking Yuma’s father PR approach and his mind games. He is doing this to suggest that Yuma is far from the level of other young skaters such as Shun (which is not true at all) and is already a candidate for the gold in Beijing. Yuma can actually win in Beijing because, most importantly, he has the support of JSF but even with that, his true ability is limited and his win heavily depends on many other athletes not delivering, including Nathan, Vincent, Shoma, Misha, even Keegan, etc. But yas, this is absolutely the mind game that his father is playing for Beijing.

[Melodie]

12 hours ago, sweetwater said:

2/2 is a mistranslation. It is coach Kagiyama (Yuma's father) who wants Yuma to master all kinds of quads except 4A next season and include quint in the 2023-2024 season. He sees such potential in Yuma seeing his 4T and 4S.

Eh, he should focus on fixing the flaws in Yuma's jumps first (but it is not going to happen because he believes his son's jumps are amongst the best out there).

 

But also, I do wonder if he sees the potential of quints in Yuzu's jumps, seeing that he did rotate both 5T and 5S.

8 hours ago, KendallKlaire said:

I've always had very mixed feelings on parents acting as coaches. Usually parents are involved anyway (helicopter parenting i.e. Vincent Zhou or Yuna Kim's mom) but I feel just having your parents as a coach adds more stress to training and the child-parent relationship. However, now that Yuma is receiving JSF support his father may feel Yuma can do anything (add more jump and, ugh, quints) and get ridiculous scores. I believe Yuma does love skating, but I can't help but wonder if his relationship with his father will remain so healthy (I'm just skeptical given recent developments with Alysa Liu and her father). 

 

I do think Yuma is a great talent and will take over the men's field once Yuzu and Nathan leave, but he does not deserve to score so high over other young Japanese men like Shun or Kazuki (my personal fav after Yuzu). The JSF favoritism is so obvious that it is hurting Yuma's popularity I think. From what I'm understanding from Japanese Fanyus on Twitter, Yuma is being pushed A LOT before nationals. 

Ya know who else? Kao. 

 

The kid has solid jump basics with correct toepick (something both Yuma and Shun don't), great speed and flow across the ice and improving PCS. In general, his raw potential is greater than both Shun's and Yuma's. 

 

Just like with Shun, it is going to be an uphill battle for him to win over Yuma just because.

 

[Anni]

Fuji TV has uploaded new videos

 

Wakaba

Yuma

 

 

 

[Anni]

New CM for JNats

 

 

 

Article about Kaori and Mai

 

[Anni]

Interview with Wakaba

English translation
https://www-yomiuri-co-jp.translate.goog/olympic/2022/20211217-OYT1T50186/?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de

[Melodie]

That was very unexpected. Didn't she come back to Japan to prep for Nats already? Also, what are the chances of her making it to Beijing now? 

 

 

 

[Kizuna]

 I'm very sad about Rika's situation. Pushing through injuries for months / years, and then to not recover in time for the culmination of this Olympic cycle.

 

The thing is, to be given consideration for the Olympics, basically you have to be top 3 among Japanese in the world standings / season's world rankings / season's best / medalled at Worlds before. Rika is definitely not in Yuzu's situation here. She's still top 3 in the world standings, but there are other strong Japanese women on the team. I'm not sure JSF is willing to push her to be on the team when she hasn't competed this season and her last Worlds showing wasn't great.

 

 this is disastrous.

[Melodie]

8 hours ago, Kizuna said:

 I'm very sad about Rika's situation. Pushing through injuries for months / years, and then to not recover in time for the culmination of this Olympic cycle.

 

The thing is, to be given consideration for the Olympics, basically you have to be top 3 among Japanese in the world standings / season's world rankings / season's best / medalled at Worlds before. Rika is definitely not in Yuzu's situation here. She's still top 3 in the world standings, but there are other strong Japanese women on the team. I'm not sure JSF is willing to push her to be on the team when she hasn't competed this season and her last Worlds showing wasn't great.

 

 this is disastrous.

[Comment deleted]