As some of you may have guessed, I spent a lot of time researching the Japanese federation website. I don’t think I have found all the competitions that Yuzuru Hanyu has participated in. Some areas of the site are not complete, minor competitions are not considered, and I may have missed checking something. Even so, I found competitions I didn’t know about, and I found the protocol analysis fascinating. I count on republishing them on my blog, in a very irregular way, and thus retracing his path.
In truth, not all competitions have a protocol. In some of the youth competitions the 6.0 scoring code was still used, so we have the judges’ votes and the ranking, not the protocol.
From the early years we know that Hanyu entered a competition interpreting Ultraman Gaia when she was five, and that he finished second.
Then there is the Daiei Cup in Matsudo, Chiba prefecture, when he was six years old.On one occasion I saw the program listed as Amateur Horse Race. The costume looks a lot like Woody’s in Toy Story, the jumps we see are a single lutz and salchow.
The first competition I found traces on the Japan Skating Federation website is the Tohoku-Hokkaido Championship. The category is Novice B, reserved for children between the ages of 9 and 10. The qualifying competition for the National Championship are divided into six blocks linked to six different geographical areas. Hanyu is part of block 1. I can’t link directly to the page I’m interested in, so I insert the link to the page dedicated to the 2004-2005 season and then I’ll explain where I clicked.
For a Japanese what I write is trivial, but for those who don’t know Japanese I think these explanations are a help. The first line is dedicated to Block 1. If you click on the long text you will find the results of the junior and senior qualification competitions. Saya Hanyu also participated in the junior category. I point out her presence for one reason only: little Yuzuru wanted to outdo his sister, so with her protocol you can get an idea of the role model he had. For the results of the Novice competitions you have to click on the last part of the row, the one around which I have made a red circle.
On the next page you will find the results of category B and category A. I highlighted in red the results of the competition in which Hanyu participated. In green I highlighted a detail that I think is useful. The first kanji tells us that that this is a Men’s competition, the second that this is a Women’s competition. On the last page of which I took the screenshot we see the judges’ votes. Obviously Hanyu won.
The first classified is Hanyu, the second Jun Suzuki, born in Sendai May 8, 1994, so a little older than Yuzuru. If you’re curious about Suzuki, this is his page on the Japanese Wikipedia. For one judge, Suzuki skated better than Hanyu for the artistic part (I remember that with the score system 6.0, when the sum of the technical and artistic scores was the same, in the short program a better position was assigned to those who obtained the best technical score, in the free skate a better position was assigned to those who had obtained the best artistic score).
On the other names I do not pronounce myself. I could translate them with an automatic translator, but probably some would be terribly crippled (I laugh every time I think of Keiji Tanaka, who in automatic translation becomes Tanaka Criminale), so I leave it alone. Officially, Hanyu’s path to dominate figure skating starts here.
I wanted to do something quick, just one screenshot, so that wouldn’t take me more than a couple of minutes … I’m literally unable of being synthetic.
