On the morning of February 10, 2022, in the free skating final of the men's single skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics, Japan's Yusheng Yushin opened with a historic difficulty of 4A jumping - in all the previous competitions of Yusheng Yuxian, this is a performance that has long surpassed wins and losses, although the 4A jumped off the ice, he finally became the "ideal Yusheng knot".
Wen | Lai Youxuan
Edited | Golden Stone
1
Four years ago, on February 17, 2018, the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics figure skating men's singles competition ended, and Japan's Yusei Yusuke successfully defended his title, becoming the first and youngest winter Olympic men's singles defender in the past 66 years. In the post-match press conference, asked about his goals for the next four years, he said:
"All the motivation is only 4A, I have achieved what I can achieve, I have done what I can do, and all that remains is the goal I described as a child." 」
What is 4A? In short, this is considered the limit of human physical ability, an unprecedented move – no figure skater has ever successfully made a 4A in a competition.
The full name of 4A is Axel around the jump, among the six jumping actions of figure skating, Axel jump is the only one to take off forward, and it is also the most difficult action of all jumping actions. In the past journey of countless figure skaters to challenge the limit, the four-way jump has been considered the limit - usually, the figure skaters need about 0.7 seconds from the start to the ice, and the four-way jump requires them to complete a total of 1440 degrees of rotation in these 0.7 seconds, and when they land, they have to bear an impact equivalent to 7 times their own weight.
Yu yusuke completed the four-way jump for the first time in a competition
Compared with other four-week jumps, the difficulty of 4A is that in the actual jump, it needs to jump for half a week, that is, the player needs to complete a total of 1620 degrees of rotation in the same time.
With the hardest jumps to complete the most spins, The Russian figure skating godfather Alexei Mission said in an interview that in his lifetime, no one can complete the 4A because it exceeds the limits of human physical ability.
Tarasova, the Godmother of Russian figure skating and has trained countless world champions, shares the same view, "This jump has not yet been completed, it is very scary, very difficult, it is easy to smash yourself by trying it." 」
In addition to exceeding physical limits, in actual competitions, 4A is not a "cost-effective" choice.
In the scoring rules set by the International Skating Union (ISU), the 4A is only 1 point more than the second-ranked hooker's four-way jump (4Lz) – the base score of 4Lz is 11.5 points, and the 4A is 12.5 points. But the difficulty of the two movements is completely different levels, and the reason why the score difference is so small is that the ISU did not think that at this stage there are athletes who can complete the 4A in the official competition.
Today's men's single skating field has embarked on a serious four-way jump inning – more and more players are looking for more four-way jumps in a set of free skating moves, which can be used in a more reliable way to get them more technical points to win the game. This is obviously a more "reasonable" choice for all athletes, except for Yu Yusuke.
Why is Yu Yuyu so stubborn to lock his life with the 4A? In many interviews with the Japanese media, he talked about how winning the Olympic gold medal was a dream, but after winning it, he had a feeling of "burning out", and with 4A, his life after that had a new meaning: "I can really skate for myself." 」
"With 4A, I can live so vigorously, and (4A) is my last dream as a competitive figure skater to gamble on my life." 」 He said, "I want to jump 4A because I want to satisfy myself, so that I can hold my chest up and say, this is the best feather knot string, this is the ideal feather knot."
Source documentary "Yusheng Knot Strings Fight Hard to Defend The Crown"
2
As a figure skater, because of his outstanding technical ability and artistic expression, Yu Yusei has been called a "man in the sky" and "a unique presence in the history of figure skating", and his athletic achievements, the first Golden Slam player in the history of men's single skating, are enough to match this evaluation. In addition to his achievements, what he is most praised for is his fighting spirit.
Born on December 7, 1994 in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, his father named him "Knot String" in the hope that "he would be as calm and full of fighting spirit as the bow string on the bow."
When he was 4 years old, in order to strengthen his body and overcome his asthma, he followed his sister to the Sendai Ice Rink, walking around the ice rink every day, and was later discovered by the enlightenment coach Mammy Yamada, who commented on him at that time: "I have never seen such a child who is not afraid of ice."
Subsequently, Yu Yusei showed not only the absolute talent of the sport, but also a strong desire not to be afraid of challenges.
Yu Yu is a child with a picture source network
When he first started training, he would take notes, and even when he went to bed at night, he would try to go to the ice rink the next day in a half-dream and half-awake. The first time he competed in a national competition, he won the gold medal.
When he was a child, the TV station interviewed Yusei Yusuke and asked him what his future dream was, and he combed the same mushroom head of his idol Proshenko (the Russian figure skating king, known as "Pu huang"), saying that he wanted to win the Olympic championship, and he also had to jump around the world and jump around and five weeks. He was 11 years old.
In the sixth grade of elementary school, his mother told him that he could give up whenever he wanted. And what he thought to himself was, "Absolutely to show you."
At the age of 17, he left Sendai and went to Toronto, Canada, to join the famous "Cricket Club Team Brian", which is known as the "World Figure Skating Champion Machine", where Yu Yusuke has a special technical guide, jumping coach, glide coach, choreographer, and different coaches provide him with comprehensive guidance.
Mom Yumi accompanied him all the way, looking around toronto for ingredients to cook Japanese food for him, in order for him to have a better state of concentration training, his mother kept the home in good order, even the smell was familiar. Yusei trained at the ice rink almost every day, and even if his coach advised him to go out and play, he was not impressed, not even to Niagara Falls near Toronto. At the end of his training, he returned to his room to continue waseda University's "Human Intelligence" course, where he also studied ergonomics and wanted to study his body with more sophisticated knowledge.
At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, 19-year-old Yu Yu won the championship in one fell swoop, becoming the first Asian to win the Olympic championship in men's singles skating.
In November of the same year, in Shanghai, during the competition of the Figure Skating Grand Prix In China, there was a scene that countless spectators will remember for a long time - before the free skating competition, Yusheng Knot and Chinese player Yan Han collided, both of them were injured, Yusheng Knot Instantly stained the ice rink with blood, and 7 stitches were stitched in the chin. But after a simple bandage, he returned to the ice rink, and the coach advised him to give up, but he turned around and shouted "jump" over the ice rink. Chinese commentator Chen Ying said she had been explaining figure skating for more than a decade, and for the first time she had seen athletes performing with bandages wrapped around their heads. In that game, he took off and fell 5 times in 8 jumps, and finally finished second with a high score for artistic performance, and this four-and-a-half-minute performance was also known as "indomitable four-and-a-half minutes".
Yu Sheng's knotted string competition at the Shanghai Figure Skating Grand Prix China
Yusei Yuki has always carried a notebook that reads "Absolutely win", which he wrote in October 2012 after his defeat at the Figure Skating Grand Prix. Before the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, he suffered a serious ankle sprain during training, at this time, there were only three and a half months left before the start of the Olympic Games, and finally, he looked at the four words written 6 years ago, stood on the field of Pyeongchang with the help of painkillers, and after a set of short program performances with almost no flaws, the camera captured him standing in the middle of the ice rink and said softly to himself: "I'm back."
In Yusei's view, for the sport of figure skating, what he has to do is not limited to "winning". He believes he has a mission on his shoulders, and in an interview with CBC, he said, "Every time, I bet my life on figure skating. I think I have a mission in my life, and that's why I was born here. I was born for my figure skating."
Therefore, he believes that he has an obligation and must be the one to challenge the 4A.
Yu Yushin was the winner of the 2014 and 2018 Winter Olympics
3
The four years from Pyeongchang to Beijing were the four years that Yusheng yusheng struggled for the 4A. Especially after the global outbreak, he could not go to Canada to train, but could only stay in Japan and start a long, lonely and even hopeless challenge.
For more than 600 days, he stayed alone in his hometown of Sendai, training on the ice rink of his childhood, which was 4 meters less than the regular ice rink of international events, which was open to the public during the day, and could only be rented to him for training from 6 p.m. to 10 o'clock the next day.
In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake, he was practicing on this ice rink, after the huge shaking stopped, he climbed out in skates, the family house collapsed, and the family of four spent 4 days in the shelter leaning on a blanket. The place where the child was trained has also been devastated, and there are many displaced residents in the hometown. The year after the earthquake, he had to choose to go to another city for training, and he regretted this decision for a long time, feeling that he had betrayed everyone. Even after winning the gold medal at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, he was still saying, "This gold medal didn't help the earthquake revitalization, I felt a deep sense of powerlessness, I felt like I hadn't done anything." Later, he kept performing ice performances to collect donations for Sendai, and the royalties of his autobiography were fully donated to the ice rink in Sendai. This time, in order to challenge the 4A, he insisted on staying in Sendai, staying in the ice rink of his childhood, because that was where he came from.
According to Japanese media reports, for two years, Yu Yusei arrived at the ice rink in the early morning and began training for his own, one-man without a coach.
What kind of two years he spent, people can only know from some interviews.
In an interview, he said that sometimes, he really fell into a "negative whirlpool", without the company and guidance of a coach, even physical care became very difficult, the mood became worse and worse, and when it was most painful, "I really thought about giving up skating".
At the end of 2020, after the all-day match, a reporter asked him, what was that painful period like?
"Completely dropped into the abyss." Really." He picked up the microphone and answered. After a long pause, a long time of organizing the language, he added, "There have been times when I felt that what I was doing was really useless." All kinds of training, training methods... Whether (the program) can respond to everyone's expectations, in the end can I jump out of the 4A. I heard that everyone was stronger, better, and that I was the only one left behind, and I was the only one who kept falling into the dark abyss... There was even a time when I couldn't even jump 3A."
During that time, he could only communicate with the coach by email, send his training video, and then wait for a reply. At the same time, the young top players are constantly improving their skills, increasing the number of jumps around the game, and he, as a challenger of the 4A, is likely to cause other jumps to gradually become invisible or even unable to jump for this goal.
This made him more anxious, he knew that he had to do it as soon as possible, because of the increase in age, more and more injuries, "if you don't jump 4A quickly, your body will continue to weaken".
In the past four years, in the public practice of many competitions, Yu Yusuke has been trying 4A non-stop, but almost every time, he will fall the ice, and several times, the other players in the same competition will slow down and slide, stop and watch him take off, spin, and then fall, and then jump again. There were ice fans who counted, and once, he tried 4A 6 times in 13 minutes.
Last year, during a performance in Yokohama, Japan, Yusuke Yusei laughed backstage and told the choreographer, "The body is in a state of death." Knees, it's terrible." Later, he rolled up his pants, a large patch of dark blue bruises spread from his calves to his thighs, and the plaster on his knees, the choreographer covered his mouth in surprise and asked him, "Can I slip?" He replied, "I can slip, no problem."
It was just a glimpse of the game, and no one knew what Yu Yu had been going through in training alone.
In an interview, he described it this way: "I have also been asking myself why I can't even do this, why I can't jump up... Sometimes I think maybe no one can make it. I jumped and pursued, and I didn't know when I would succeed. So every time I jump, every time I fall on the ice, sometimes I fall too much, and I even think, maybe when I have such a concussion, maybe I will die like this."
Yu Yusuke's attempt at 4A failed
4
Last April, after the team match of the World Figure Skating Championships, Yusei Yushin took an interpreter to the room of Alexei Mishen, the godfather of Russian figure skating. Closing the door, he sat there and asked Mission why he couldn't jump out of the 4A no matter what, and what should he do? That day, they talked for 40 minutes, And Misshin casually wrote down something in his small book, and before leaving, Yu Yu asked through the translator, can you take pictures of the notes?
Mishen commented on the Feather String in front of him: "He skates in a world that belongs only to himself, there are always some players who are good at selling themselves, always shouting to choose me, he only focuses on his own world, he skates for himself." 」
As the Beijing Winter Olympics approached, there was still not much good news about Yusheng knotting, and more and more unoptimistic voices began to appear - this is not nonsense, after all, in the 4 years from Pyeongchang to Beijing, as the strongest opponent of Yusheng knot, the American Player Chen Wei has been able to complete 6 four-way jumps in a set of free skates, and the two have met many times in the world competition, and the winners are Chen Wei, who can complete more jumps.
This seems to have begun to become a trend of men's single skating today, some players even choose to cut off the articulation action in order to save physical strength, and not too many people will invest too much energy in music and choreography.
However, Yusei Yushin is a rare figure skater who arranges his own music, and in order to adjust the rhythm of the performance, he will record his breathing sound and add it to the music. After the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, in an ice performance, he collaborated for the first time with Japan's world-class pianist Nobuya Kiyotsuka to create a song "Spring, Come", which in Japan not only became a "life song" that comforted countless people, but also "redeemed" The Feather Knot, who suffered alone in Sendai after the epidemic.
He said that when he was very depressed, really hated figure skating, and even felt that there was no way to do it, he re-slid this song "Spring, Come On", so that he felt again, "I still love figure skating."
In terms of performance costumes, Yu Yu has also put a lot of work into it. He would treat every performance as a work of art, not a simple competition. The costume dedicated to idol Pushanko's "Dedicated to Nijinsky" used more than 80 hand-cut rose petals to make up of 50 roses, 3 embroidered butterflies, and more than 2,000 Swarovski crystals. And the costume weighs only 620 grams because of the innovative materials , which is part of his performance , and I want the audience to think that this is a performance that can only be done by Yu Yusuke: "It has to be this show, it has to be this costume."
Habuyuki Strings Slip "Spring, Come"
After a defeat to Chen Wei, Yusei Yushin, who returned to China for an interview, also talked about the value of his opponent, "If it wasn't for him, I might have thought I had reached my limit." [I]'m at the end of my career, and it's always extra bright when the candle is about to go out... Of course, it would be a little scary if the candles were completely burned out, and I might be like Tomorrow's Father."
"Tomorrow's Father" is one of Japan's most influential bloody anime, telling the story of the young boxer Yabuki Shō in the ring, endlessly burning his life.
Obsessed with boxing, Yabuki has almost no youth of his peers, locking himself up in a boxing gym full of sweat, vaseline and pine resin day in and day out, which makes many people think of Habu yusuke outside of the manga, jumping, spinning, falling ice, falling, falling, getting up, and pursuing a goal that is almost impossible to achieve.
In the last battle of "Tomorrow's Zhang", every time Yabuki falls to the ground, he will get up, fall to the ground, climb up, his right eye is blurred, and his mouth is still muttering, "Not yet, I haven't burned out yet." Almost all Japanese people knew about this scene, and in the end, Yabuki, who could no longer get up, fell to the corner of the ring and was reduced to ashes. As he himself said, "I will exchange the enthusiasm of life for my ideals, I will not live my whole life like everyone else, my youth is constantly burning in bright red blood, and only a pile of ash remains after burning."
In that interview, Yusuke Yusuke also mentioned this ending, and he imitated the scene of Yabuki turning into ashes on the spot, sitting there, bowing his head, and not moving.
In December 2021, two months before the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Yu yusheng, who suffered an injury, participated in his only match of the season, the All Japan Figure Skating Championships. In public practice before the game, he tried the 4A again and fell safely on the ice – the first time in the history of human figure skating that he fell safely on the ice. But in the following official matches, the 4A still failed to finish, although it fell on the ice, but because of the lack of weeks, it was relegated to 3A. But this is already the closest human race to the 4A in figure skating.
For the first time, Yu yu jumped out of the 4A of the first safe ice fall in the history of figure skating
After the game, he talked again about why he was so obsessed with the 4A. "In a sense, the barrier-like thing that humans have built so far, I think it's 4A, and I want to cross this barrier. 4A is probably the wall of limits for us figure skaters, and I wanted to create that chapter that goes beyond the limits."
Thousands of kilometers away in China, an ordinary ice fan retweeted a video of Yusei Yusuke trying 4A in the all-day race on social networks, writing: "I am not a fan of you, but it is true that you made me understand why the Olympic slogan is not 'gold, silver, bronze', but 'higher, faster, stronger', and now 'more united'." The reason why competitive sports can become an exciting place in ordinary life is not because of the competition for medals and championships, but because of a group of people with absolute talent in a certain physical ability, on behalf of us human beings, to those seemingly ancient, inviolable laws, launching impossible challenges again and again, all efforts may eventually fail, but this shows the motivation and perseverance of human beings."
5
On February 6, 2022, Yusheng finally arrived in Beijing.
He was almost the loneliest of all the contestants in the men's singles competition – since his coaches Brian Orser and Tracy were also coaching players from other countries, Yusuke Yusuke chose to let them accompany the contestants while he set foot on the ice rink alone. In the corner of the stand not far away, Mom Yumi sat there, silently accompanying her.
On February 8, before the short show match, Yusei yushin saw two coaches in the background, and he nodded as he walked over, touched them one by one, and then turned away to continue his warm-up. This is not the first time he has played alone, the recently concluded all-day tournament, and he is also the fifth time to win the tournament without a coach.
At 12:19 p.m. that day, Yusheng yuxian officially appeared at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
In the short program performance, the first action was unexpected, because the ice knife stuck in an ice hole during the jump, resulting in a mistake, he did one less set of four-way jumps, but he quickly adjusted and completed the follow-up action with almost no flaws. After the game, a photojournalist photographed him choking up with excitement, thanked the audience and the referee, and before leaving the ice rink, he deliberately slid back and gently touched the ice hole with his hand. In an interview afterwards, he jokingly said, "Did you do something that made Ice Face hate me?" It seems that bad luck is used in this hole."
Graph source network
When the referee scored, he sat alone in the waiting area and received a score of 95.15 — a score nearly 19 points less than the American Chen Wei, who ranked first in the short program, which also meant that he was already 19 points behind his opponent before the final free skating match began.
One choice is in front of Yu Yu - to continue to challenge the 4A in the world's top figure skating competition, or to reduce the difficulty, use more secure movements, better expression to pursue a medal, or even a gold medal, to achieve the Olympic men's figure skating triple crown that no one has achieved in the past 94 years? After all, even if he completed the 4A in the free skating competition, the technical basis score of the whole set of actions is far lower than that of Chen Wei, not to mention that the 4A will increase the risk of the whole set of actions.
The answer was soon revealed. In the free skating arrangement released on the afternoon of February 8, "4A" appeared in the first of all the moves of Yu Yusei, and he decided to start with this to complete the last performance of what may be the last Olympic Games of his life.
American Dick Barton, the last athlete to achieve two consecutive winter Olympics men's singles skating titles, is now 93 years old. He was very much in favor of Yu yusuke's choice, and in an interview, he said that the players of this era did not have the courage to change the world of figure skating, they were firmly bound by rules and scoring, and no one tried to challenge new techniques. He described the contestants as more and more challenged to jump around in order to chase the score, "like a tight rag". He thinks that a good performance should be to relax the skating while making sure that everyone's eyes are tied to you, infecting the audience with emotions, "the string can be done."
On the day the short program competition ended, Yusei yusho also received a distant blessing from his idol, The Russian figure skating king Pushshenko, who participated in the four Winter Olympics. Proshenko wrote on Instagram: "I just want to say one thing, Yu yusuke, you are an amazing athlete. Your dedication to the world of figure skating is priceless, and I wish you the freedom to skate the day after tomorrow."
On the morning of February 9, Yusei yusho performed his last official ice training before the free skating competition. He tried 4A again, but the results were not ideal, one time his feet fell on the ice, and once he fell. Before leaving the venue, he bent down and touched the ice surface of the Beijing Capital Gymnasium.
At 12:14 p.m. on February 10, Yu Yu started his free skating performance.
The music he chose was "With Heaven and Earth", which is the theme song of a famous Japanese drama Ōkawa, which featured the Sengoku warlord Kenshin Uesugi. "Although [Uesugi Kenshin] is known as the God of War, he knows the joys of fighting very well, but at the same time he also has entanglements in his heart, and he can always feel the sacrifices that accompany him when facing battles with himself."
Accompanied by the music of "With Heaven and Earth", after a period of sliding, he jumped forward, spun, fell on the ice, and fell down – this was the first time in the history of figure skating competitions at the Winter Olympics that humans tried to complete the 4A. At the end of the song, the Chinese commentator Chen Ying described Yusheng's performance as follows: "Defend an unbearable city, fight an unwinnable battle, put all your glory and all your glory under the wheel of history, and the banner is awe-inspiring."
Today, he has finally become the "best feather knot", "the ideal feather knot", and for competitive sports, he has also completed the ultimate mission of a top figure skater, as he himself has said many times -
"I've never felt like a champion, I've always been a challenger."
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NHK Sogo (2012.11) "Athlete's Soul Yuzuru Hanyu 17 Years Old To Height"
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NHK Special (2018.2) "The Road to Gold Overcoming Adversity"
TBS (2016.4)"Solving the "Strength and Weakness" of Superheroes
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