This is the translation of a post I published a few days ago.

We all got to Yuzuru Hanyu through figure skating. Nothing strange about this. A child starts playing sports and if he goes on, if he’s good, at a certain point important results begin to arrive and the public notices him. With due proportions, it happens in all sports with all athletes of a certain level. What usually doesn’t happen is for an athlete to outgrow the sport that made him famous. That he receive two medals of honor, not one, because he hasn’t achieved extraordinary results just once. That he is only the 27th person, and the youngest, to receive his nation’s most important award, the People Honor’s Award. Receiving award normally awarded to cultural figures, such as the Kikuchi Kan Prize. That he receive academic recognition, such as those assigned to him by Waseda, the University from which he graduated, which also published his thesis, because what he has done goes beyond what is normally presented by undergraduates. That he is named person of the year by the Public Relations Society of Japan, a society that has nothing to do with figure skating. That he opens a Youtube channel capable of exceeding 786,000 subscribers in six months, when the ISU channel, opened 11 years earlier, has just reached 281,000 subscribers. That he started his pro career by selling out a show in which he went on the ice alone, selling 7,900 tickets for two days in a row, and that he was forced to sell tickets via a lottery because demand was so much higher , despite live television broadcasting and livestreaming in over 100 theaters and cinemas across Japan, while organizers of major competitions are unable to fill 6,000/7,000-seat arenas. Not even the European Championship was sold out, even if on the last day the stands were almost full. The first day… never mind.

Whatever we look at, what Hanyu is doing, what he’s been doing all these years, it’s not normal. The awards that he is continuing to receive, the affection of the public, the popularity, are just a natural consequence of what he has done. Not victories, victories alone are not enough to explain the attachment of fans towards him, the emotion felt by those who witness his performance, or who have the opportunity to talk to him. The victories are important, they are what brought us to know him, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.

Hanyu started skating at the age of four, reaching the national podium at nine, in the following years he continued a path of growth that would lead him to become the strongest. He did it fast, winning gold at the Junior World Championship at age 15. His peers competed in the juniors, he moved up to the seniors. We know the route, I don’t intend to retrace it competition by competition, but if someone needs to remember some details, the Wikipedia page dedicated to Hanyu is so well done that it has been judged one of the best pages in terms of completeness and accuracy. The main page, then there are several subpages, because it’s impossible to summarize everything in a small space.

At 15, Hanyu was a promising skater. The greatest promise of a skating, the Japanese one, which was experiencing the most important moment in its history with Daisuke Takahashi who had already climbed the Olympic and world podium, in the second case winning gold, and other skaters who had the potential to do so. Takahiko Kozuka and Tatsuki Machida would have climbed the world podium, Nobunari Oda would have narrowly missed it, and also Takaito Mura and Daisuke Murakami, all older than Hanyu, would have taken various satisfactions at an international level. Among the women, the skaters were even stronger, and more numerous. With all the rivals he had at home, how many had noticed him internationally? The junior competitions are not very popular even now, and even the Four Continents Championship, where 16-year-old Hanyu, as a rookie, won a silver, is not a very followed competition. Some experts and some fans figured he was an interesting skater, but outside of Japan for the others Hanyu, as of early 2012, was little more than a name at best.

Nice 2012 is one of the turning points. The short program didn’t go well, with a double instead of triple toe loop as the second jump of the combination, and above all a single instead of triple lutz as a jump preceded by a step. Hanyu had injured his right ankle in training the day before, something we would only know after the competition. The information, which makes what Hanyu did even more incredible, has nothing to do with the emotional impact of his performance, precisely because the injury became known later. What was known at that moment, which the journalists remembered, is that he is from Sendai, a city that is located in one of the areas most affected by the earthquake that had occurred just over a year earlier. The program is Romeo + Juliet, with music by Craig Armstrong. Not the classic version of Nino Rota that he would skate two seasons later, but the modern one, from Baz Luhrmann’s film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Hanyu had turned 17 three months earlier, Shakespeare’s Romeo Montecchi is 16. The identification is immediate, in age, but also in the impulsiveness, in giving all of himself, without sparing himself, at the cost of making mistakes and pay in person for mistakes that someone more mature perhaps would not have made.

He starts with a textbook quadruple toe loop, +2.43 GOE. Since the ISU Judging System has existed, only Brian Joubert, at the 2011 World Championship, had obtained a slightly higher GOE, +2.57. Patrick Chan, who will go on the rink later to take his second world title, will equal it at +2.43. The jump is huge, and landed with remarkable confidence. And, immediately after, there is a triple axel preceded by a spread eagle which is another marvel, the best of the entire competition. Probably the two jumps, the speed with which he moved, had already allowed him to capture the entire building. But Romeo wouldn’t be Romeo, and as figure skating enthusiasts would discover in later years, Hanyu wouldn’t be Hanyu, if all went smoothly. At the end of the footwork he falls, hands and knees to the ice. A trivial fall, coming in a transition, after he had already completed four jump elements, three without problems, one with the second jump of the combination attached only he knows how. We clearly feels a GASP at the moment of the fall. The audience, the commentators in all languages, are appalled by a mistake they did not expect.

How do we move forward after a mistake? How, after an unexpected error? At seventeen, and at his first appearance at the World Championship. Hanyu gets up, perhaps a little too slowly, and then executes the triple axel-triple toe loop combination, something that only Takahashi and Joubert performed that day, besides him, but the quality of their combinations is not the same of his combination. Completed immediately after a fall on a turn. This is the moment in which he captures all the spectators, this combination, the scream after the second spin, and the slide backwards, kneeling on the ice during the choreographic sequence.

Sometimes it happens to read absurd comments, comparisons that make no sense, because everything must be evaluated in its context. Hanyu did only one quadruple, a toe loop, that day. In the 2011-12 season, he performed one quadruple per program. The second quadruple in the free skate came in the 2012-13 season, but it would take him a long time to find stability on the salchow. Today there are many 17-year-olds who do at least three quadruples in free skate. So? If the value of skaters was measured only by the number of rotations of their jumps, we would have to consider Gillis Grafstrom, winner of three Olympic golds and one silver between 1920 and 1932, not so strong. I have no idea what doubles he did, certainly not the double axel nor triple jumps, as both elements were introduced to figure skating by Dick Button after World War II. As for Button, he didn’t need quadruples, or even two triples, to win two Olympic golds. The jumps, the technical difficulties, must be put in relation to the era in which the program was interpreted, and Hanyu’s free skate, at that moment, was the one that registered the sixth highest score in history, after one each of two of his compatriots, Kozuka and Takahashi, and two of Patrick Chan. From a technical point of view, Hanyu proved to be very strong that day, and on an interpretative level he was enthralling. That he only won the bronze (with the second free skate) is not important. Those who witnessed that performance will never forget it.

Medals are important, and it’s important that Hanyu made a difficult comeback and got on the podium, but a difficult comeback, in itself, is not enough to win over the public. The following year Javier Fernandez would also win a world bronze after skating the seventh short program. Fernandez with his pleasant program, only minimally disturbed by a couple of popped jumps and a small stumble in a choreographic passage, would not have received the standing ovation from the Canadian crowd that the same crowd had paid to Hanyu in the Grand Prix final 2011, or that the public in Nice had paid him in 2012. The free skate of that World Championship in some ways is Hanyu’s career, with its difficulties but also with a strong passion, and it is that passion, capable of the difficult moments, the energy that permeates every gesture, the courage to go ahead and give everything to the end, what conquered the public. This is not something that is taught, or that is related to medals. Even with its imperfections, even with good but still to be refined skating skills (but the musicality was already remarkable), this program continues to stand out even when compared to programs much more technically difficult, but skated without passion.

Nice is a stage, one of many. Looked at in hindsight, with the competitive path concluded, we could speak of circularity, with a bronze medal in the first and last world appearance, even if the circumstances are very different. He had already started building an extraordinary career Hanyu, with this competition he just entered the most important stage. The aforementioned first national title, in the Novice B category, in 2004, won at the age of 9. The second national title, in Novice B category, arrived in 2008. He Would have won the national title in all categories, Hanyu. The successes achieved as a child would become part of a bigger story. In 2008 he had reached the podium for the first time in the national junior championship, setting a record for precociousness in that competition, although three years later his record would be surpassed by Shoma Uno, younger by about ten days. However, Uno’s podium would have been obtained with two fourth places in the two segments of the competition, Hanyu had conquered it after a wrong short program, only the seventh due to a mistake in the combination, and coming back strongly, presenting the best free skate. Then there was the 2009-10 season, with a single non-podium finish, sixth place in the senior national championship, at the age of fifteen and in a Japan that had now become a powerhouse in individual figure skating. The rest was a triumph, with every junior competition won, including his second national title in the category. All competitions mean the two Grand Prix competition, the final and the World Championship (plus the National Championship), something that only Alexander Shubin in 2002-03 and Stephen Carriere in 2006-07 had done before him and which has not been repeated to this day. These are the first two stages of the Super Slam. At the time only Yuna Kim had conquered him, then Maxim Trankov (with two different partners), Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir, Aljona Savchenko (with three different partners), Alina Zagitova, Hanyu himself and finally Wenjing Sui/Han Cong achieved the Super Slam. Then there was the debut among the seniors, with the first quadruple landed, and at the end of the season the first international medal, a silver at the Four Continents Championship. In that event, the Four Continents Championship, he would win his last international gold nine years later, a gold that would allow him to complete the Super Slam. The closing of a circle, even if there would still be some competition.

With that unexpected medal the figure skating world started talking about him, about asthma, about the earthquake. Asthma is something that is there. It complicates his life, it makes everything more difficult for him, but it would have created serious problems on only one occasion, in Stockholm in 2021, otherwise he and everyone knows it’s there, but pretend it’s not there. Hanyu takes his precautions and goes on, and while knowing that he always competed with a handicap might have brought him any fans, that’s a minor detail. An earthquake is something much bigger. It is because we all remember it for better or worse, and because Hanyu made sure that it could not be forgotten. Even if he was among the “lucky ones”, those who were not affected by the tsunami, who didn’t have to mourn the loss of loved ones, and who experienced severe hardships for a limited time, the one who lived is not an experience that is easily forgotten, or that he wants to forget. He participated in shows whose proceeds were destined for the victims, he acted in the first person when he decided to allocate the royalties from his autobiography, Aoi Honoo, to reconstruction, even though his fame was still limited and that money would have been useful to him. His commitment was initially known only in Japan, over time his contribution would become known to all. And since the 2012 NHK Trophy, all his gala programs would have been dedicated to the earthquake. He had already transformed White Legend, the short program of the 2010-11 season, into a reminder of suffering and a message of hope during the 2011 shows, he would soon start doing it in a much more conscious way. The first program is Hana ni nare. Over the years, Story, Hana wa saku, The Final Time Traveler, Requiem of heaven and Earth, Notte Stellata and Haru yo, koi will follow.

The intensity of these programs is something extraordinary. An intensity that is perceived even when the gestures accompany the words of a song sung in a language we do not know. These programs alone, without knowing anything about the context, without knowing the skater, without knowing the man, would be enough to captivate viewers. Hanyu puts his soul into the performance, and it shows. Then the fans who follow him more closely know of his donations even if he doesn’t talk about it, of his continuous commitment, they have seen his empathy every time he has had the opportunity to meet someone who has been more unfortunate than him. These are not things anyone can build. Medals can be decided at the table, a person’s character cannot. And people respond to the character of their interlocutor. That dark border surrounding my montage is not a starry sky. Hanyu, but also many other survivors, spoke of the starry sky they saw, in the darkness of the night of the disaster, when there was no electricity. Not for nothing is the show that Hanyu is organizing, dedicated to the earthquake, called Notte stellata, Starry Night in Italian. No, that edge is the starry sky that the audience dedicated to Hanyu. They are the spectators who turned on their mobile phones during the 2021 World Team Trophy gala. He skated, he bared his soul to heal the wounds of those who were watching him, and those who were watching him embraced him in a hug. Something that cannot be built, but can only be donated spontaneously.

Nice turned the spotlight of the figure skating world on Hanyu. They would never turn off again, not even in the worst moments. And even the worst moments would have helped to give birth to the legend.

Notre-Dame de Paris, the free skate of the 2012-13 season, is not as engaging as Romeo + Juliet. The potential was there, we saw it in the encore of the last day of Fantasy on Ice 2022, but at the time, with one more quadruple, the change of city (and continent) and training method, and an important work on skating skills, Hanyu he didn’t have the energy to do the program justice. But those who followed the competitions saw him fight to the last, at the cost of collapsing on the ice exhausted at the end of the programme. In relatively unimportant competitions like the Finlandia Trophy at the start of the season, and in big competitions like the World Championship, when everyone knew he was out on the ice while injured For him, the injury was not important: Japan was fighting for three spot for the next Olympics and Hanyu, the reigning national champion, could not disappoint his nation. He didn’t disappoint Japan.

Fourth place, with third free skate, the only time he hasn’t finished on the podium at an ISU championship.

Opening the draft of the post, because it takes me several days to write such a long post, I found myself reading this sentence by chance, without having read the context first. The sentence wasn’t isolated like now, it was in the mid of a paragraph. I was going to where I stopped and the words fourth place, with third free skate, the only time he hasn’t finished on the podium made me think of Beijing. There too he finished fourth, with the third free skate, and the other two times he had been on the podium. It’s not an ISU championship but the Olympic Games, and even if the circumstances are different, there are some ties, from the sprained ankle to the fact that he didn’t disappoint the public. Despite the absence of medals.

The two competitions with which Hanyu opened and ended the 2012-13 season and the 2022 Olympic Games, with numerous other competitions in between, including the 2018 Rostelecom Cup, won despite an ankle that I don’t even know how to define due to how swollen it is, are separated for so many years, and while spectators watched the competitions, wondering how he managed to skate in certain conditions, they also saw something else.

They saw the duality of a boy who gradually became a man who, as he prepares for competition, welcomes the adoration of the public in a royal way, with an essentiality of gestures and a detachment very different from the friendly greetings of many skaters, because he goes to the rink to be admired, not to joke, even if at the end of the performance he gives his heartfelt thanks even when the program didn’t go as he would have liked. They saw an athlete who does not forget that he is on stage, with identification in a role that continues even when the program is over, but who enjoys joking outside of the competitive moment, letting emerge that childish side that many adults tend to to suffocate. They saw a person who wants to win with all his might, but who respects his opponents. The image above right is the kiss & cry from the 2014 World Championship. After the short program Hanyu was third, trailing Tatsuki Machida by 6.97 points and Javier Fernandez by 5.18. Machida had already skated, Hanyu didn’t know if he would be able to overtake him (yes, he would have preceded him, with a final advantage of only 0.33 points), and he took care to ask the audience to be silent so as not to disturb Fernandez, who was preparing to hit his free skate knowing that if Fernandez skated his best, Javier would stay ahead of him.

This attitude, asking the audience for silence by interrupting the celebrations in his honour, would not change over the years, and would go hand in hand with his ability to compliment his opponents when he has been passed, or to say a few comforting words to a disappointed opponent, before starting to celebrate for his own triumph. Even in the moment of the most important success. And it’s something that the audience sees, as it has always seen a skater who bows, from a certain moment on touching the ice to greet it, every time he enters or exits the rink. A gesture of respect that is normal in martial arts, which is part of Japanese culture, but which other skaters don’t do. Not that they have to. Certain gestures are not done because they have to be done, but because we want to do them. Because they are part of us. And respect for the ice, for the public, for everything and everyone, is part of Hanyu. We see it in everything from folding the flag when others are balling it up (or not placing his nation’s flag on top of another nation’s) to crawling into a narrow passage so as not to disturb another skater during his interview, to helping the rink workers redo the ice, when he was still little known as well as after he became the strongest of all time.

The images come from various points in Hanyu’s career, between 2012 and 2022. I could have looked for other images, and who knows how many other episodes, but each image takes time. What matters is his constancy in giving all of himself and in respect for the environment and for others. What is important is his intelligence, which emerges in every interview. Is his sensitivity, his ability to identify himself in the shoes of others, his availability. We have seen some things live, others we learned later, and they are all episodes that speak of the strength of the athlete and of the man, who never gives up and who does not feel the need to crush others to prove he is the strongest. There are many champions who become arrogant with success, not him. And not only.

That folded flag, with a few moments stolen from the moment of triumph to dedicate them to his country and not to himself, because it would have been easy to simply place the flag on the balustrade in a messy way, and continue to celebrate, speak to us of his attention to every detail. He pay attention to everything, from what surrounds him to people, because the testimonies in which he has done something for others are very numerous. Even little things, that others wouldn’t notice and that he notices. And attention to skating. He would talk about it many times, saying that he always wanted to express his idea of skating. His skating, with an attention to music that no other skater has, not for nothing Keiichi Yano will make 33 versions of SEIMEI, with changes of up to eight tenths of a second in the interval of two sounds to adapt the music to Hanyu’s rhythm in a combination. It would have taken Yano a month to make that music, when for most skaters he can complete the job in a day. The difference between background music, on which the skater limits himself to moving, perhaps even doing difficult things but which do not merge with the notes, and music that is listened to, understood and interpreted. Attention that begins away from the ice rink, not only with the choice of the piece and its composition, and which includes the costume and the choreography, touching every smallest detail, down to the fingertips, and until transforming each gesture, each performance, in art. Term to be used with caution, with the art that derives from an absolute mastery of the technique, because an artist can really be such only if he has the technical skills to express what he wishes to express, but which with Hanyu he has full reason to to be. Technique and art together, for something perfect and capable of touching emotions, beyond the sporting result.

The audience had been captivated, long before perfection, by the intensity that Hanyu always put into his interpretations and his ability to feel the music. After Romeo + Juliet, it was Parisienne Walkways to stand out, with which he set his first world records. However, the records, the very high scores, tell everyone that a skater is strong, that he can win any competition, but by themselves they are not enough to conquer the imagination of the spectators, to capture their heart. It takes the skater to put himself into what he does, not just performing difficult elements, but trying to connect with the audience. Continuing to work to improve himself, even after having already achieved extraordinary results. Being satisfied, after a few records have been set, is the easy choice, not the right one, and the easy choice can lead to some results being achieved in the moment, especially if the circumstances are the right ones, but in the long time doesn’t pay.

Parisienne Walkways in the 2012-13 season was a very good programme, well suited to him and well interpetated. He set two world records, he could have been satisfied. Anyone else would have. Instead Hanyu has worked to perfect himself, and from the first Grand Prix competition, Skate America 2012, to the interpretation of Sochi 2014, the body position has become much more natural, the legs in the high kick are higher (in the last series of screenshots I added, in the center, the NHK Trophy 2012, and after the triple axel he did a little side kick rather than a high kick), the edges deeper.

There are athletes who win, athletes who write the history of their discipline, and athletes who remain engraved in people’s hearts. Hanyu is all three, with the Sochi 2014 medal becoming the first Olympic gold medal by an Asian skater in his discipline. But a season dominated as he dominated it, with successes in the three most important competitions, two more world records, one with the first score above 100 points in a short program ever achieved by anyone, weren’t enough for him. They weren’t after an Olympic free skate that, although it was the best free skate of the day – something many tend to forget – was not what he had in mind, what he wanted to do and that he knew he could do. The following years will start from this moment, from this triumph with disappointment. From the desire to become the best possible version of himself, through another dramatic moment.

This is something that no one is to blame and could have had dramatic consequences. Luckily neither of them suffered any permanent consequences, but the crash was really bad and the fact that they both skated was a huge risk.

I read reports, years later. I can only try to imagine the anguish of those who lived those moments. The minutes of the competitions, the weeks until complete recovery. All the problems of a very complicated season, including the December operation linked to the residual urachus and the subsequent ankle sprain. What cannot fail to strike is the determination of an athlete who at that moment was clearly in poor physical condition but who did not spare himself. Who put all his energy into the take off of a jump, fell and got back up. And then he did it again. And then he did it again. In the end, the competition protocol will speak of two quadruple jumps, a high number for the time, seven triple jumps and a double. And five falls. His will be the second highest technical score of the day, the seventh highest base value of the entire men’s international senior circuit of the 2014-15 season. We can ask ourselves why he was allowed to compete in those conditions – on some occasions I read that Hanyu had suffered a concussion and this is not true, the doctors had ruled out concussion, although obviously thorough tests would have been needed – but once he went on the ice we can only think about what happened, not what could have happened. Regardless of everything else, we can’t help but admire his strength. And we can’t fail to recognize that an episode that should not have occurred contributed to the growth of his legend.

Just over a month later Hanyu competed in the Grand Prix Final. He almost didn’t go there. If Jeremy Abbott hadn’t finished behind him by just 0.15 points at the NHK Trophy, Jason Brown would have gone to the Final, not Hanyu. A very small gap, lower than the 0.33 points that had allowed Hanyu to win his first World Championship, higher than the 0.03 points that had allowed him to win his first Grand Prix competition, the 2011 Rostelecom Cup, and to qualify for his first Grand Prix Final. As if it was fate itself that wanted to occur those results that he has always pursued with determination.

It’s not often that an Olympic champion makes the Grand Prix Final in the same calendar year that they won their Olympic title. Since 1998, with the establishment of the Grand Prix circuit, Hanyu has been the first to do so. After him only Alina Zagitova imitated him. All the others have stopped, some only for a season or two, most forever, satisfied with the success. Going forward because success in itself isn’t enough, because you’re convinced you can do something more, isn’t for everyone, and the public notices this. And, after narrowly qualifying, Hanyu dominated the competition to win both programs despite a fall on the last jump, also in both programs. He wasn’t at his best, everyone had seen the crash in the first competition, they knew by the time he had skated in the second he hadn’t fully recovered yet, it was obvious he was short of training, but that Phantom of the Opera is showing a remarkable growth in skating skills, and a quadruple salchow that finally had become that wonderful jump that fans would come to know. Not for nothing after the first triple axel, Kurt Browning, commenting the performance for Canadian television, would have said “Jumps like that possibly are dropped from heaven, and he just was the right guy to catch it” and immediately after Carol Lane would have added “You know, there are good skaters, and there are great skaters, and then there is Yuzuru Hanyu, who’s on a whole other level“. That program, despite the fall on the final lutz, would remain the best free skate of the season, all skaters considered, and the second best free skate ever, at least until the SEIMEI just under a year later.

There have been other competitions during the season, other problems, not other victories, at least not internationally. He took the disappointments, the mistakes, the unfortunate episodes, analyzed them and reasoned on what to do. And what he did is legend. We know a lot about the birth of SEIMEI, we have seen some short videos on the creation of the costume, or the choreography, and above all we have the video of the meeting with Nomura Mansai-san.

Probably the most overused term in the world of figure skating is artistic. We talk about the artistry of a program, about the fact that a particular skater is an artist, and we lose touch with reality. Art is often contrasted with technique, as if technique meant making a lot of jumps and that’s it. But, as Hanyu would explain after winning his second Olympic gold, the art is based on absolute mastery of technique. It should be obvious, many tend to forget it. Michelangelo Buonarroti would not have created the works of art that he created if he did not have absolute control of the technique. The fact that he also had a world-class brain, and that all his life he carried on his spiritual quest, are part of him, part of him being an extraordinary artist. But if he had had everything else, but hadn’t been able to use a chisel or a brush, we wouldn’t now admire his work. And this goes for all artists, whatever art they have dedicated themselves to. SEIMEI couldn’t have been born, it wouldn’t have been the program it is, if Hanyu hadn’t understood the story of the character he plays, if he hadn’t immersed himself in music, if he hadn’t reasoned on the meaning of every gesture, if he hadn’t been able to express with perfect movements all that he had internalized. The video of the meeting with Nomura is a very precious testimony, it allows us to see the interaction between two geniuses, to understand the background a little better. It helps us get to know Hanyu better, and every time we know something about him we can’t help but marvel at his intelligence, his attention to detail and the breadth of his interests. But, even if we hadn’t known anything, we would still have had that NHK Trophy, and that’s a lot.

Between that competition and the Grand Prix final there are four programs, skated in two weeks, which have changed everything and completely redefined the discipline.

The technical difficulties, two quadruples in the short program, three in the free skate, had already been brought to the rink by some skaters, no one had done it with a quality comparable to that of Hanyu. This is the dividing line, something that the scores would soon stop recognizing, but which is there for all to see: perfection. And perfection cannot be invented. Pretending there is, trying to convince viewers that a thing somewhat cobbled together is good just because it’s nominally difficult, only leads to disaffection.

The numbers of that day are something that had never been seen before. The protocol is that of the Grand Prix Final. I would have liked to surround +3, the maximum mark at the time, and 10.00, but the image would have become too messy. I limited myself to highlighting when an element, or a single item of the components, received the maximum score. On the right, thanks to SkatingScores, I checked the highest marks on GOE and PCS ever awarded since the ISU Judging System was invented up to the free skate in Barcelona. I put them in chronological order and highlighted the NHK Trophy scores in light green, the Grand Prix Final scores in dark green. Nothing like this had ever been seen, and the words of all the commentators who did the live commentary testify it.

It has never happened that a skater precedes the runner-up by more than 50 points, it happened in Nagano. In Barcelona, against the best skaters in the world, the advantage was not much below 40 points. At that moment all those who followed figure skating knew that he was the strongest, and that the others could only win if he made mistakes.

In two weeks Hanyu destroyed the scoring system, making it clear that it was no longer fit to judge his programs. Those who had to take care of the score, check that everything was working properly, took the fragments of an imperfect system and assembled them in another way, distorting it until obtaining something completely different from the original project. Until we had the words in the rulebook saying one thing, the numbers saying another, and the results ended up having little to do with what the skaters did.

And, again, the moment of triumph was followed by enormous difficulty. Already in Barcelona Hanyu felt pain in his right foot, something he would only reveal later: Lisfranc injury. Before the World Championship there were rumors about a possible foot injury, only after that second place did we know what the problem was and how serious it was. And an injury that would have ended the career of an athlete less determined, for him has become an opportunity to grow, with the addition of the quadruple loop in his programs. Not the only addition he would make, Hanyu was the first skater able of completing the quadruple toe loop-euler-triple flip combination, and is still the only skater who has performed the quadruple toe loop-triple axel sequence. He did it with a different rule, when the sequences were worth less than the combinations. Now that counts as a combination, not a single skater other than Hanyu has yet attempted a quadruple as the first jump of a sequence.

The technical work, the quest to complete extremely difficult elements to perfection, took place under everyone’s eyes, because Hanyu grew up in the spotlight. Among the men’s post-war Olympic champions, only Manfred Schnelldorfer (10 seasons between 1955 and 1964), Ondrej Nepela (10 seasons between 1964 and 1973), Evgeni Plushenko (12 non-consecutive seasons between 1998 and 2014) and Hanyu (12 seasons between 2011 and 2022) have competed at a high level for at least ten seasons. Schnelldorfer and Nepela competed in years when television coverage was limited and the sport was of minor importance. With the current television coverage, the pressure for the athletes has increased, but the fans have got to see Hanyu grow up and become attached to him. It is no coincidence that in the United States Michelle Kwan, winner of only one Olympic silver and one bronze but present at 12 World Championships in a row and on the podium (with 5 gold) 9 times, is more loved than Tara Lipinski, winner of the Olympic gold in 1998 just ahead of Kwan but present on the international circuit for only three seasons, and Sarah Hughes, winner of the Olympic gold in 2002 but present on the international circuit for five seasons, with only a world bronze. It’s not impossible for fans to really love someone who lasts so short, but it’s more difficult. And when an athlete grows up in the spotlight, the public sees everything he does. And, in addition to an unprecedented difference in score with the second classified and which testifies his strength, the public also sees the difficulties, with an alternation of moments of euphoria and moments of concern that consolidates the emotional bond.

With Hanyu, we never knew in advance what competition we were going to see. In the short program of Skate Canada 2015 he performed a perfect triple axel, 3.00 GOE points, and immediately after he managed to get a no value on two jump elements. He scored more points with spins than with jumps, in that program. Twelfth and lowest base value of the day, eleventh TES, and best PCS. Four weeks later it was the NHK Trophy, and with a more complex layout he didn’t do any mistake.

Hope & Legacy in Helsinki in 2017 was perfect, the best free skate ever skated by anyone in an international competition, matched only by Ten to Chi to in 2020, in a national competition. A complexity of edges, of steps, unmatched by anyone else, plus four quadruples, all executed to perfection, an interpretation that gives goosebumps. The free skate with which he conquered the second world gold is extraordinary, but so is, in a different way, the free skate with which he had performed a month earlier, at the Four Continents Championship. There he popped a jump, missing the quadruple-triple combination. And, immediately after, he had modified three jump elements to recover some points. This too is legend, the desire not to give up, and the intelligence to make the right calculations even while skating, maintaining a very high quality throughout. Even with all the changes he improvised in his programs, including the one that allowed him to win his second Olympic gold, in his entire senior career Hanyu broke the Zayak rule only once: in his second competition, the 2010 Rostelecom Cup, when he was 15.

They didn’t know what would see even those who attended the 2017 Autumn Classic International. With a perfect short program Hanyu set the world record, the twelfth personal. In the free skate the next day, with eight jumping elements and three combinations planned, instead of the three jumping elements and a combination of a short program, and with a choreo sequence that earned him 3.82 points, the technical score is more higher than that of the short program by only 2.85 points. Hanyu it is not a robot, a machine that presents the same program every time in an identical way, as if they are photocopies. And it’s not just a problem of technical errors, which at times there have been and which he has partially remedied several times by improvising a different layout than the one planned. It’s a problem of emotions. When he failed to get into the part, the program became a disaster, even though he always fought to the end to try to get the best result possible. When he really got into the part… on some occasions it was clear from the very first gestures that it would have been a perfect program. No one else has been able to reach the perfection achieved by him, not in the men’s competitions.

“You know, there are good skaters, and there are great skaters, and then there is Yuzuru Hanyu, who’s on a whole other level“

Hanyu got the first results thanks to the technical aspect. Not that he was bad at skating even in his first senior season. There were some better, even more experienced skaters than him, but over the years he would perfect every move. Right from the start there was an absolute mastery of the triple axel combined with risky layouts, with a technical score that has always been among the highest, helping him to write the history of the sport.

He was the first skater to land the quadruple loop. For every rotation that is added to jumps, only six skaters can do it. Button landed the first double axel in the 1948 Olympic, winning the gold medal, the first triple loop in the 1952 Olympic, again winning the gold. Button was the only skater able of landing first two new jumps, even if it shouldn’t be forgotten that Button competed in the immediate post-war period, after an 8-year suspension from competitions, otherwise perhaps someone would have managed to perform the double axel before him. The first double axel attempts date back to the 1930s, but between 1939 and 1946 the most important competitions were not held. Button with the triple loop and Hanyu with the quadruple loop were the only skaters who landed their jump when they were already champions. The others, with the sole exception of Donald Jackson, who completed the first triple lutz in the program that earned him the world title, and who won also because he landed that jump, were less important skaters, such as Vern Taylor and Brandon Mroz, or promising but young skaters, who hadn’t won anything yet. Kurt Browning in 1988, Timothy Goebel in 1998, Shoma Uno in 2016 and Ilia Malinin in 2022 had nothing to lose, and for them the jump was an attempt to try to get among the best skaters, or a way to gain notoriety, like were the triple lutz-triple flip combination and the attempted quadruple axel (jump downgraded to triple and concluded with a fall) by Artur Dmitriev Jr. As Browning himself recalled with regard to his quadruple toe loop, unlike the skaters who they were competing for the world title,”If I missed, it was no big deal; I had relatively little to lose” (Kurt Browning, Kurt. Forcing the Edge, p. 81).

Hanyu had dominated doing fewer quadruples than Boyang Jin, he didn’t need to execute the quadruple loop to win. He did it because he never considered stopping, settling for what he already knew how to do, as an acceptable option. Compromising, giving up trying to move his own limits, is not part of him. And that’s something the audience sees, as he sees that, after winning everything, in the biggest competition he chose the risky path, not the safe one.

Playing it safe in Beijing meant putting the quadruple axel aside, inserting in both programs the quadruple lutz, a jump that he already knew how to do and which he could have made even more stable, if he had worked on it seriously after the 2021 World Team Trophy, and aim for a higher base value with less risk. He could have done it. Goebel performed his quadruple salchow in a junior competition (the first edition of the Grand Prix Final), Uno his quadruple flip in that fashion exhibition which was the 2016 Team Challenge Cup, Malinin his quadruple axel in a Challenger Series, and if Hanyu also performed the quadruple loop for the first time in a Challenger Series, and if different circumstances (an injury, a different decision) led him to never attempt a quadruple loop at the Olympic Games, in Beijing he tried the quadruple axel. He knew what he was risking, he went ahead anyway. The others would have made calculations, he decided to put the calculations aside and want to aim for an ideal. Isn’t that the nature of human beings? Don’t we all aspire to an ideal? We may never achieve it, but what drives us goes beyond numbers. And Hanyu, with that jump, with his conscious aspiration to the ideal, with his getting up immediately after the fall, and with his carrying on always remaining true to himself even when he knew he was in danger of being hurt, is something that goes beyond all else.

In the press conference Hanyu said he was praised for his courage to keep going, even though his quadruple axel attempt ended in a fall, and the competition with a fourth place that doesn’t do justice to the way he has skated. To what he did, despite the falls. But if he was praised for his challenge, he wanted to remember that challenges are part of everyone’s life. That his challenge has been magnified by the press because its name is quadruple axel, but that anyone who makes sacrifices for his family, has difficulty with work, faces equally important challenges, and in the same way deserves to be praised. In a moment of physical suffering, where it would have been easy to lament the misfortune of ending up in an ice hole and be bitter about what happened, Hanyu expressed his gratitude to the audience, bringing himself down to the level of ordinary people as he always has. Bringing ordinary people to his level, and giving those who listened to him hope and courage.

The free skate concluded majestically after two falls, the mixture of humility and pride in a painful press conference, the embrace of the public on his path even after the end of the competitions in July, are all the fruit of his being Hanyu Yuzuru. Him, and no one else.

Two Olympic gold medals, something that only Hanyu and Button won after World War II, and Button succeeded in a smaller skating world, which did not include Spaniards or Japanese, or even Russians (try to see how many more medals he would have won, or which would have been more valuable, by removing only these three nations, or even just the first), and in which the Americans had an advantage over the Europeans in that they had the rinks, their opponents did not, because the rinks had been destroyed by the bombs in the war.

Two world gold medals, and we could discuss at length why they are not more, seven world medals in all, in the post-war period only he and Jan Hoffmann succeeded, only that Hoffmann had to settle for a silver at the Olympics. I only look at the post-war period because before, it was another skating, but in reality, with the advent of television, things have changed again because the pressure weighing on the strongest athletes has increased, especially in recent decades, when worldwide live broadcasts have replaced previous services summarizing the competitions. And during his career Hanyu has missed three editions of the World Championship, two due to injury and one because it was cancelled, otherwise the medals would have been more. For seven years in a row, between December 2014 and December 2021, Hanyu stood on the podium in every competition he entered. There are 31 consecutive competitions (I’m not counting the team medals, otherwise I would have to add three, and if we wanted to, he earned the medals, since he has always been among the three best skaters in the men’s event). Only Evgeni Plushenko has a streak of podiums longer than him.

19 world records set, second in number of world records is Plushenko, with 13. True, with the score code 6.0 world records did not exist, but in recent years no one has demonstrated the same consistency at the highest levels, with an increase in the score that is the result of continuous work to improve. Gradual increase in most cases, not created artificially by the judges, sudden on one occasion only, in the autumn of 2015, when with two perfect programs he put to good use the work begun after his first Olympic title, because in the troubled 2014-15 he had never been healthy enough to try to do what was on his mind.

Numbers, which say a lot and say nothing. They don’t say that Hanyu’s skating idea doesn’t match the rules. That even if he was sometimes forced to adapt to the rules, he has never forgotten what makes figure skating worth watching.

Numbers that say something about the athlete, but which cannot tell who the man is. Not even my text, confusing, dispersive, with constant leaps in time and subject changes, with important episodes left aside, is able to truly say who Hanyu is, because his popularity goes beyond victories. The only sure thing is that Hanyu has always been himself, he has always given his all with determination, but also with intelligence and sensitivity, on and off the rink. And the public feels it. You can build victories at the table, we have seen many in recent years. As for getting into the hearts of the spectators… that’s a whole other story.

A gift of light, always.