In the women's 500m event at the recent All Japan Speed Skating Championships in Nagano, Nao Kodaira won the title again and set an eighth consecutive title in the event, but more importantly, she also bid farewell to her career as a professional athlete in her hometown of Nagano after finishing first.
The event was sold out because it was also the final battle of Nao's career, and for the first time since hosting the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998, the Nagano City Olympic Memorial Stadium was almost full, with about 6,400 spectators attending, and this is also because she is not only a Japanese speed skater, but also because she has written a major milestone for Japan to win the first women's speed skating Olympic gold medal.
Born in 1986, Kodaira Nao began to skate at the age of 3, and years of training have allowed her to perform well when she was a student, winning many championships in national competitions, and after graduating from university, she also won the top three in the World Cup competition, writing the best results of Japanese athletes in the World Cup.
In 2009, Kodaira Nao also won the bronze medal in the women's 1000m at the Winter World University Games in China, but in addition to showing her superb strength Chinese, she also showed her fluent Chinese when she gave a speech after the race, which impressed everyone.
At that time, Kodaira Nao and South Korea's Lee Xianghua and China's Zhang Hong were regarded as Asian speed skaters, but after winning the team pursuit silver medal in the first Olympic event of her career in 2010, she failed to win a medal at the next Sochi Winter Olympics, finishing fifth in the 500 meters she was best at, and even only 13th in the 1,000 meters, compared to Li Xianghua's 500 meters and Zhang Hong winning gold in the 1,000 meters.
After losing the Sochi Winter Olympics, Kodaira Nao also had to face up to the problem of the peak of her career, if by the time of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, she would be 31 years old, which is long past the peak period for ordinary athletes. Unwilling to give up her unmet Olympic goals, however, she decided to change her training pattern and go to the Netherlands, a major speed skating country, for more rigorous training in order to go longer.
The coaches of the Dutch Speed Skating Club that Kodaira Nao entered at that time were all famous players who had won multiple Olympic gold medals during this period, and unlike in Japan in the past, the two coaches had more practical experience, not only telling her to show a stronger ambition than her opponent when competing, but also to find out the most suitable posture for her to slide, but also after returning to Japan, she also found a way to change her previous posture with the help of her previous coach in Japan, and her final results also sublimated.
The completely transformed Kodaira Nao launched a counterattack at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, not only interrupted Lee Xianghua's dream of winning three consecutive titles in the 500-meter event, but also set a women's 500-meter speed skating Winter Olympic record with a time of 36.94 seconds, becoming the first Japanese athlete to win the women's speed skating gold medal, and then successfully won silver in the 1000m, the 31-year-old fiercely surpassed her previous opponents in front of her, and set a brilliant record, telling the world that her peak is created by herself.
South Korea's Lee Sang-hwa, who failed to win the silver in his home stadium, was sad and wept, when Kodaira Nao went to hug his old friend, who was also a friend and foe, and the picture of them hugging each other wearing the flags of their respective countries has also become a classic picture of the Winter Olympics.
Unfortunately, at this year's 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Nao Kodaira failed to reach the top again due to a foot injury affecting her performance, and she also decided to bid farewell to this competition that she had been competing in for many years, and finally took the event held in her hometown as the final battle. After the competition, she said that the feeling of finishing the competition was far more than the goosebumps she felt when she was here as a child, and that after practicing skating in Nagano, she finally drew a perfect end to Nagano after writing speed skating history for Japan.