An asthmatic boy from Sendai became figure skating's first men's Super Slam winner
Yuzuru Hanyu was diagnosed with asthma at two and started skating at four only because a coach wanted him out from under his sister's feet. He went on to win back-to-back Olympic golds, the first man to do so in 66 years, then filled Tokyo Dome with 35,000 people for a solo ice show.
Born in Sendai in December 1994 to a schoolteacher father and a mother who sewed his early costumes, Hanyu has a given name meaning, roughly, a tightly strung bowstring. Coach Mami Yamada noticed his impatience and his sincerity; her successor, Shōichirō Tsuzuki, drilled fundamentals and the Axel so hard that Hanyu still counts that jump as his strength. When his home rink closed for two years, he trained elsewhere and travelled three hours at weekends to Yokohama. At 11 he cheekily challenged the Olympic silver medallist Stéphane Lambiel to a spin contest, lost badly, and resolved to improve.
His competitive career, from 2004 to 2022, produced Olympic titles in 2014 and 2018, two world championships and four straight Grand Prix Final wins. Winning the Four Continents title in 2020 completed the Super Slam of every major junior and senior crown, a first in men's singles. He set world marks 19 times under the judging system introduced in 2003, topped the world standings for five consecutive seasons, and was first to land a quadruple loop in international competition.
The 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck his hometown when he was 16 and shaped everything afterwards. He has given more than 3 million dollars towards reconstruction and disaster work, including all his Olympic prize money and the royalties from his Blue Flames autobiographies, and chairs an annual commemorative ice show.
Turning professional in 2022, which Nikkei Asia called the end of an era, he invented a new format: Ice Story, solo productions that combine skating with philosophical narratives told through on-screen narration. Prologue was the first solo ice show and Gift the first skating event at Tokyo Dome; the series had drawn over 200,000 spectators by April 2026. Japan gave him the People's Honor Award in 2018, its youngest recipient, and he was the first figure skater nominated for a Laureus award.
Source: Yuzuru Hanyu
