Yuzuru Hanyu first participated in the national championship in October 2004. The category was Novice B, reserved for 9 and 10 year olds. He would have turned 10 a month and a half later. He won ahead of Jun Suzuki, who he had already overtaken in the qualifying competition, and this time there was unanimity: all the judges felt that he was the best.
You can find the results here.
Among the votes in the second score, Presentation, there is also a 5.1, and this convinced him to be very strong, because only the best skaters in the world received votes higher than 5.0 If we look at the short program of the World Championship skated a few months earlier, in the votes of Johnny Weir, provisionally fourth, there are two 5.1. Sure, the other votes are higher, but getting the same grade Weir received must have been for him a nice boost of confidence.
Behind him were Jun Suzuki and Kentaro Suzuki. I don’t know anything about Kentaro Suzuki, of Jun Suzuki I inserted the link to the Japanese Wikipedia page in the previous post. We know the difficulties of Hanyu, and we know that when the Ice Rink (which at the time was called Konami Sports Club Izumi) closed on December 25, 2004 due to economic problems, he moved to the Katsuyama Skating Rink. When, two years and three months later, his rink, now called Ice Rink, reopened, he went back to training there. Jun Suzuki trained at the Katsuyama Skating Rink. That rink was closed on April 30, 2009, and later demolished, and the area was turned into a parking lot. In this case it was Suzuki who lost the rink.
The fact that so many Japanese skaters have become strong in this millennium is surprising, considering the difficulties with the rinks that many of them face. On one occasion Hanyu had an advantage, but it was a coincidence. When his first coach, Mami Yamada, left Sendai for family reasons, she phoned Shoichiro Tsuzuki to ask him to go to Sendai and train a very promising student of her. Why was Tsuzuki able to afford to move to Sendai? Because the Matsudo rink where he trained had just closed. Hanyu trained with Tsuzuki thanks to a sheer coincidence.
Jun Suzuki ran out of rink and moved to Sapporo. For Japanese skaters transfers are on the agenda or almost, Rika Hongo is also from Sendai, she trained at the Katsuyama Skating Rink but she moved to Nagoya when she was 9. Training in Sendai? Terribly difficult, and the chances of getting strong from there were very slim.
Jun Suzuki had stopped competing at the end of the 2011-2012 season and concentrated on his studies, but seeing Hanyu win Olympic gold in Sochi brought him back on ice. Between some injuries, problems with the rink, the temporary abandonment of the sport, Suzuki has never become really strong. In his career he participated in only one Grand Prix Junior competition, in 2011, finishing eleventh, and his best result in the senior national championship is a tenth place in December 2017. When we saw him in some photos at the time of his last competition, the December 2019 National Championships, along with Hanyu, Keiji Tanaka and Ryuju Hino … their careers have followed very different paths, but the four skaters started together and certainly share quite a few memories.
In the ranking I translated two other names, the ones I was familiar with. Hino and Tanaka. Hino started skating in 2001, then after Hanyu. We know that Hanyu started skating at 4 years old, considering that he was born in December we can assume that he started skating in 1999, a few months after the Nagano Olympics (and I remember that among the participants in the Nagano Olympics Shizuka Arakawa, 13th, Takeshi Honda, 15th, Yamato Tamura, 17th, and Marie Arai/Shin Amano, 20th, trained in Sendai. Of course, at the time there were still two rinks that were opened). At that age, having started skating two years earlier can make all the difference. Hino finished sixth, Tanaka eighth. Tanaka also started skating in 2001, at the age of seven. I suppose when, in the next two seasons, Hanyu was overtaken by two peers who had started skating after him, he didn’t like it. But that’s the future. Here, in October 2004, Hanyu won his first national title thanks to the double axel.
