Text/Ying Hongxia
Editor/Li Xu Liang Lina
Visual/Wang Ye
At the Beijing Winter Olympics, the "Yusheng String Storm" is coming. Axel jumped around with his new goal, leaving a common mark on the history of figure skating that belongs to mankind.
"4A, 5 points." On February 10, 2022, the Men's Singles Free Skating Report Card of the Beijing Winter Olympics impressively recorded such words. For the first time in the history of the ISU official event, Axel's Four Weeks Jump was officially recognized.
"I found the feeling of 4A. It may not really be something that humans can do, but in a sense, I think, I jumped out of my own four-and-a-half jump. Yusei Yushin, who competed in the Olympic Games for the third time, said, "The Beijing Winter Olympics condensed all my pride. ”
The history of human figure skating has since entered the era of four-and-a-half jumps. And the strongest feather knot string, always in the next game.
01, the world is looking for habu knots
On February 8, 2022, the Capital Gymnasium was bathed in the warm winter sun. This day is the competition day of the men's single skating short program of figure skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics. At 6:00 a.m., the first group of warm-up players was welcomed in the museum.
At 7:50, in the quiet photography army, suddenly there was a light clicking sound of brushing. Two-time Winter Olympic champion and Japanese player Yusuke Yusuke appeared in the fourth group.
When I was putting on my shoes, an interesting scene happened: on the outside of the protective mat field, the door was open inward. One of the contestants slid over, and he quickly squatted down and pulled the protective pad door out, then let go of the way, as sweet as ever.
This was the first time he had stepped on the ice at the main stadium of the first body, just two days earlier, just four hours before he started playing at 12:19 p.m. that day. This is a real "airborne landing": arriving at the venue two days before the game, only "stepping on" the auxiliary hall for training once before the game, and going to the main ice stadium on the day of the short program competition.
"The whole world is looking for the feather knot." Before he appeared in Beijing, in the past few days, this legendary name has been frequently sent to the hot search.
In the first body, since Yusheng's name appeared on the pre-competition training schedule, looking for Yusheng has become a daily lesson for the media army from all over the world to report on the figure skating competition of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
At the scheduled "training time" of Yusheng, the shuttle bus from the media workshop to the figure skating training hall was busy several hours in advance, and the museum had to adopt a "flow restriction", allowing only up to 30 text journalists to enter. Figure skating media and ice fans all over the world are eagerly awaiting the third Olympic journey of "The Prince Who Came Out of the Comics".
On February 6, the men's singles short program lottery day, only ITU people and team officials attended the ceremony, and Yu Yu was "drawn" to the 21st appearance in the short program. Almost on the front and back feet, the familiar figure of figure skating fans appeared at the capital airport, and "Yusheng Knot String Arrived in Beijing" instantly rushed to the hot search.
02, the return is still a teenager
"He is one of the greatest figure skaters in history, and let us welcome The Japanese player Yu Yusuke." At 12:19 a.m. on the 8th, the main stadium of the first body witnessed the debut of the Beijing Winter Olympics with Yusheng knots.
Yusheng, who competed in the Beijing Winter Olympics, is 27 years old, still has a comic-like appearance, a straight posture, and even his weight is accurately maintained at 53 kilograms. But everything is the same as the PyeongChang Winter Olympics four years ago, and it is not the same.
"One of the greatest athletes in the history of figure skating." On the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the International Skating Union commented on Yusheng's knot. He started skating at the age of 4 and won six grand slams in figure skating; at the age of 19, he won his first Olympic title of his career and the Olympic champion at the age of 23. The 27-year-old has undoubtedly entered the realm of a veteran in the figure skating world, and the active athletes have become legends, which is a legend in itself.
On one side is a dazzling career resume, and between the gaps are the shadowy injuries. As a result of Yusheng's "late arrival" at the Beijing Winter Olympics, he injured his right ankle again, almost the same part as four years ago.
On the eve of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, during a public training session before the NHK Cup, he injured his right ankle while doing a hooker jump - hooker jumping around, which is the most difficult jumping action in the Pyeongchang cycle of men's figure skating.
This led to him having to drag his newly healed injured foot "airborne" to Pyeongchang. In the face of the challenges of the young jumpers around this cycle, the Sochi Winter Olympic champion conquered the whole field with the aura of the king, becoming the athlete who won the men's single skating gold medal in figure skating at the Winter Olympics for 66 consecutive years.
Behind it is The Feather String, day after day, the ultimate to the harsh self-discipline and effort. During the long period of treatment and rehabilitation on the eve of Pyeongchang, he could not get on the ice, relying on the precise imagination and muscle memory in his head, and "practiced" the movements over and over again. After resuming on the ice, he has to train on the ice for at least 4 hours a day, train for 2 hours outside the classroom, go to class between breaks, and polish his costumes and music to better match the rhythm of skating. In the end, he played with painkillers and achieved the "Pyeongchang Miracle".
At the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics conference, I witnessed Yusei muttering "No miss" in person. Figure skating fans know that the idol of Habu knot is Proshenko. The Russian prince of figure skating's perfection in figure skating is deeply immersed in the figure skating view of Yusheng knots. In the face of Sochi's flaws, Yusheng also regards "zero mistakes" as the biggest pursuit of the Pyeongchang cycle.
But the reason why Yusei is Yusheng lies in his ultimate pursuit of figure skating. Winning the Winter Olympics did not make Yusei lose motivation. In Pyeongchang, Yusei announced that he would use the 4A, or Axel,, as a new impetus for the new cycle.
03, 4A, the obsession of the lone brave
The short program, Habu Knotted Strings, brings "Introduction and Whirling Capriccio", selected from the Violin Concerto composed by the French composer Saint-Saëns in 1863. This season, Yusei has been struggling to find piano music for the short program, hoping that it is "full of The temperament of Habu knots" and that "only Habu knots can slip out", and he invited Japanese pianist Nobu Kiyozuka to rearrange the music and play it himself.
Habu chose this music to express his state of mind of training alone in Japan over the past two years, with many difficulties but still moving forward. In a later interview with the Japanese media, Shin also recalled the days of adapting the music with Yusheng, praising his excellent musicality and admiring that "he interpreted every note in a gesture of hands and feet, interlocking and tightly sewn." ”
The music began to sound, and the sadness of loneliness and melancholy intertwined. Just like the empty coaching bench on the equal stage. Before the game, Coach Brian Oser, a Canadian, decided to respect Yusei's intentions and let him fight alone for the third time in the Winter Olympics.
Feathers turned into an ice elf and began to dance.
4A, Axel jumping around, is recognized as the hardest move. It is the only figure skating jumping action that takes off forward, and because the take-off and falling directions are different, the air rotation of this action is half a week more than the other four-way jumps, or more accurately, it is a four-and-a-half jump, 1620 degrees. The force that an athlete tries to withstand for a 4A is equivalent to the impact of a school bus impact.
For this "dream goal" that has never been challenged by previous people, Yu Sheng, who has been "like an enemy and more like a friend" with injuries along the way, to some extent, he knows that he wants to be injured, but he wants to do it.
"Look at the healing of your right foot." At the 2019 Saitama World Championships, Yusei Washito was asked about his progress in practicing the 4A, saying, "Speaking of which, I'm always hurting. But this is also the result of my courage in figure skating, in sports, and in my undaunted challenge. ”
Such a challenge is destined to be difficult and lonely. The Beijing cycle, as in the past, except for a stunning appearance in the game, most of the time, Yusheng is quiet: no social media, no outing... During the epidemic, Yusei moved his training base camp from Canada back to Japan. Without the company of the coach, he can only communicate with the coach remotely.
This season, Most of the feathers have been adjusting in their hometown of Sendai, Japan. Born with asthma, he had to give up the big races after the 2020 Four Continents Race. He also sympathized with the concerns of figure skating fans, and from time to time reported the recent situation through the Japan Skating Federation, saying that he was close to completing the 4A, "the last 90 degrees away." ”
However, just two months before the Beijing Winter Olympics, he had to withdraw from the two figure skating grands due to the ligament injury in his right foot due to the practice of 4A, and whether Yusheng could participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics was delayed until the all-Japan Championships returned with a championship-
On December 23, 2021, Yusei challenged the 4A at the Japan Championships. The Japanese Championship is not an official event of the International Skating Federation, and this 4A has also been scored as "relegated" by the referee, but it is the first time it appears in the action arrangement of the figure skating competition, which is a historic breakthrough in human figure skating. His short show, free skating and two sets of moves also scored more than the world record.
A detail at the Japanese Championship revealed that the 4A was more like an obsession with Yusheng.
In the Beijing cycle, whenever Yusheng jiexian participates in the competition, he will be tortured by the on-site media to "whether he will participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics". Yusheng Yuxian always said softly and firmly: The Beijing Winter Olympics have not yet thought about it, but it "will be on the extension line of 4A".
After challenging 4A at the Japan Championships, Yusei yusuke spoke out for the first time in four years that he would "participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics".
04, short program, the trick of fate
"Absolutely for the victory. Including 4A, of course, Axel jumped around. On the eve of leaving Beijing, perhaps sensing the attention of ice fans, Yusheng intimately released a 38-second video, and at the end of the cute and cute gesture, "three", intended to aim for three consecutive championships.
Physics bully Yusheng has a precise control over numbers. In the short program of the 2019 Saitama World Championships, due to the overly harsh control of the gliding track, to the "almost millimeter level", he failed to avoid the previous track perfectly and stuck into the ice hole he left behind. With that experience, he never repeated the same mistake.
But in the short program of the Beijing Winter Olympics, fate made a big joke about Yusheng. The first four-sided jump in the opening is the inner knot ring four-way jump (aka "Sakhov") all-around jump), a move he usually does. However, the dancers on the ice suddenly jumped into the air, and after only one week, they floated lightly on the ice.
The scene fell silent. People held their breath and couldn't believe what was in front of them.
In the short program, this action is an additional jump, and once empty, the base score returns to zero. In this way, the other athletes had 7 difficulty points, and Yusei lost 14 points because of this mistake with only 6 left.
But Yu Sheng is worthy of being a battle-hardened player, and since then his performance has not been affected, especially the quality of the completion of the three weeks of jumping after the outer point ice around the outside point, the referees have given him a "4+" or even "5+" artistic performance score, and finally he ranked eighth in the short program with 95.15 points.
Before getting off the ice, he slid over and leaned over to probe the ice hole. "It could be that other players do the rear outer point ice jump, the rear inner point ice jump, or other jumping action." In the post-match mixed area, he alternated between English and Japanese, trying to accurately express the word "hole".
The media of various countries have used all kinds of language to torture: free skating, will you still challenge 4A? Yu Yu didn't hesitate: he would definitely jump around Axel, "I still have a chance to skate freely, and I still have a lot of time to practice with Aiko." ”
The 4A of the Japanese Championship was "relegated" because of the number of weeks (insufficient number of weeks); on the first day of arrival in Beijing, he frankly admitted that "he has not yet practiced and has failed"; at this moment, there are only 24 hours before the decisive battle. For Yu Sheng, however, "there is still a lot of time" - why?
In a group of conversations between Yusuke Habu and Rihanako Ikee before the Tokyo Olympics, I seemed to have found the answer.
That time, he and Chi Jiang discussed in depth how to face pressure. "How to turn refueling into your own strength, I think is very important. For example, in the past, I felt that this pressure was very heavy and made me very painful, but then I changed the way I thought, and I would turn this heaviness into down-to-earth energy, and that's how my opinion changed. “
Debuted in skating for 23 years, positive thinking in the face of trouble, has become a professional habit of Yusheng knotting. And publicly setting up a flag is his positive psychological cue of self.
05, free skating, open a new era of half-jumping around
On February 9, the day before the free skating match, Yu Yu appeared at the first training hall as scheduled. When he first stepped on this ice in Beijing a few days ago, he said, "I did a lot of 4A exercises, and although I thought it was difficult, I kept doing it." Because that's what I want to achieve no matter what, and I think it's necessary for me to beat others at the Winter Olympics, I'm going to try. ”
The ice time in the training hall is limited and precious. The contestants are grouped, each group has only 35 minutes to share a piece of ice with 6 players in the same group. He tried to take off, spin, and fall again and again. Once, after landing on the ground, he squatted on the ground slightly painfully, pressed his right foot hard, and tightened his shoelaces fiercely and practiced again. At the end of the training, Yusei rarely did not give an interview, politely greeting "I will refuel" and leaving.
No one knew his heart at the moment.
A live photographer later shared the image on social media, saying that Yusheng's challenge to 4A that day was "the closest to success he has ever seen during his time in Beijing."
On February 10, the men's singles free skating, the decisive time arrived. The day before, the media got the contestants' program composition table, yusheng knotted a column, the opening first jump clearly wrote: Quad Axel (4A, Axel around the jump).
At 6:50 a.m., the media stand in the main stadium of the first body was hard to find. At 7:20, Yusheng knotted the strings on the ice and slowly slid to warm up. At 11:35, in the sixth practice session, among the same group of opponents who warmed up in team uniforms, only Yusheng had already changed into a competition suit, and the immortal breath was fluttering, but it was he who once again put on the battle robe.
"Yusheng knot strings come on." At 12:14, Yu Yu came on and the whole field was quiet. The huge ice surface glowed with white silver light, and the whole place was waiting for a historic moment.
The thick music of "With Heaven and Earth" sounded.
Yu Sheng later said that the moment he stepped on the ice of the decisive battle, he had a strong voice in his heart, that is, "Axel must jump around the ice absolutely steadily, and the week number is absolutely going to turn." "Not many people know at this moment that his foot was indeed injured in the previous day's training and he was on the field with painkillers again.
It's a jump to the limits of humanity. Yu Sheng jumped for a full week, but fell unsteadily on the ice and fell. The base score of the 4A is 10 points, and the 9 judges on the scene unanimously determined that this is a 4A action: no weeks, no relegation. Only in the completion of the action, 5 points were deducted.
"4A, 5 points." The first successful Axel jump at the official ISU event was born. In the end, Yusei won the third place in the free skating with 189.55 points, with a total score of 283.21 points. For the first time in three Olympic Games, he missed the podium.
The post-match mixed zone has never been longer. Winding through the passage of tens of meters, he walked for two hours, 120 minutes, just like his long 23 years of figure skating life.
The trembling voice, the shoulders that shrugged from time to time, and the red eyes all revealed his mood of being slow to calm down. He is a Feather Student with a strong sense of victory and defeat, and he is also in a place where people can't see, he has made efforts that ordinary people can't imagine, and he has endured the pressure that ordinary people can't imagine.
He first broke the defense in front of the familiar Japanese TV host, said "I don't like to cry in front of the camera", turned his face, put his head against the background board, and shrugged his shoulders violently, "(After the short program) it was very uncomfortable all day, I think so, I want to jump out of the 4A anyway, and as a result (in the training the day before the game) tightened the body and turned around, and hurt my ankle again." "But [in the race] I jumped out of the best and closest to success 4A in my heart, and I felt satisfied at that."
Then came the Encounter with The Japanese Figure Skater, cameo host of the Turin Winter Olympics champion Shizuka Arakawa, "Why don't you get rewarded for your hard work", he is not willing. At this moment, Yusheng, who does not know his 4A, has been officially recognized by the International Skating Federation.
"Unhappy, not at all. I was sad this time, very sad. "Coming to the army of words, it is the end of a long passage. At this moment, YuSheng already knew that his 4A efforts had been recognized, and he had always been accustomed to accepting interviews as a way of sorting out his ideas, and in the face of the tide of this day, he blurted out, "There are thousands of thoughts, and it is difficult to say a word." ”
"I also have regrets about the Sochi Winter Olympics, but with the victory, in a sense I grew. At the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, I played out all the growing parts. But the meaning of this time, I think, may only be able to see clearly after a while. In any case, I tried my best to challenge myself in this Olympic Games, and it condensed all my pride. ”
Speaking of whether he had found the feeling of Axel jumping around, the big boy who was almost in tears was instantly excited.
"I feel good about it! Ah, it turns out that this is the speed of the half-jump around. If you fall on the ice here, it may be a little dangerous. Maybe four and a half really isn't something that humans can do, but in a sense I think I jumped out of my own four and a half jumps. This feeling may never have been experienced by anyone but me. ”
At the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, 23-year-old Yusheng yushin said that in his figure skating life plan, he only came to the "middle point".
In the future, will Yusheng continue to challenge 4A? "Please give me a little more time. I wanted to think quietly for a while. Yusei said, "I love skating, I love figure skating!"
The trip to Beijing, in just 5 days, witnessed the long-established Yusheng knot, and the evolution of each step of each day has not ended.
Why is he a feathered string? That's it. The strongest feather is knotted, and it is still in the next game. (End)