Hanyu Yuzuru

Hanyu Yuzuru (born December 7, 1994, Sendai, Japan) Japanese figure skater who at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, became the first Japanese man to win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating. He added a second Olympic gold four years later at the 2018 Winter Games in P’yŏngch’ang, South Korea.

(Read Scott Hamilton’s Britannica entry on figure skating.)

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Hanyu began figure skating when he was four years old. He became serious about pursuing the sport competitively after watching on television the heavily hyped duel between Russian skaters Aleksey Yagudin and Yevgeny Plushchenko at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Hanyu, modeling himself after Plushchenko and American Johnny Weir, eventually mastered such difficult elements as the Biellmann spin (he was one of the relatively few male skaters who performed the move) and the quadruple jump. At the end of 2009, Hanyu won the gold medal at the Junior Grand Prix final in Tokyo, and the following year he claimed gold at the 2010 junior world championships.

Moving up to the senior level, Hanyu continued to enjoy remarkable success, winning silver medals at the 2011 and 2013 Four Continents championships and a bronze at the 2012 world championships. In the 2012–13 season he earned a silver medal at the Grand Prix final in Sochi. In the 2013–14 season, in what was the last major international competition prior to the Sochi Games, Hanyu took gold at the Grand Prix final in Fukuoka, Japan.

(Read Scott Hamilton’s Britannica essay on "Training for Olympic Gold.")

At the Sochi Games, Hanyu established a new world record with a score of 101.45 points in the short program, performing a routine that included a spectacular quadruple toe loop jump and a virtually flawless triple axel; he was the first skater to surpass 100 points in a short program. Although he stumbled twice in his ensuing free skate, his overall score of 280.09 gave him the victory over rival Patrick Chan of Canada (275.62), who collected the silver medal. At just 19 years of age, Hanyu was the youngest winner of the Olympic men’s skating title since 1948, when American Dick Button, at age 18, captured the first of his two consecutive titles. Hanyu also participated in the new team event, with the Japanese finishing in fifth place.

A little over a month later, Hanyu returned to competition at the 2014 world championships and again emerged with a gold medal; he became the first male skater since Yagudin in 2002 to capture the Olympic and world skating titles in the same year. In 2015 Hanyu won his third consecutive Grand Prix title. That year he placed second in the world championships, a finish he repeated in 2016.

Hanyu captured a second world-championships gold medal in 2017 after storming back from a fifth-place standing in the short program with a world-record free-skate score of 223.30 points. At the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in P’yŏngch’ang, South Korea, he claimed a second consecutive gold medal, becoming the first man to win back-to-back Olympic figure-skating golds since Dick Button did so in 1948 and 1952. In 2019 Hanyu won his third silver medal at the world championships, and he earned a bronze at the event two years later. He competed in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing but failed to medal.