Hanyu Yuzuru and How the 2011 earthquake disaster shaped his career

Hanyu Yuzuru remembers everything clearly.

On that exact day 10 years ago when his world changed.

The Great East Japan Earthquake – a magnitude 9.0 earthquake – occurred at 2:46 pm local time March 11, 2011, while 16-year-old Hanyu was training at a local ice rink in Sendai.

It caused a tsunami, leading to a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Nearly 16,000 people died.

Since that fateful day, Hanyu – who has gone from just finishing his first season to Olympic figure skating champion – has never stopped giving back to his hometown and victims of the disaster.

Yuzuru Hanyu became a double Olympic champion after surviving the massive earthq game …

Hanyu evacuation

It was three weeks after the end of the 2010/11 season, which saw Hanyu debut and an unexpected silver medal in the Four Continents Championships.

Hanyu was on ice at the Sendai Ice Rink when the earthquake struck.

The frightened teenager, with ice cracking under his feet, immediately exited the building without stopping until wearing the ski guards, damaging his blades.

“Even now, when I close my eyes, I remember a lot of things,” he was writing in his first autobiography, Blue Flames, published the following year.

“The feeling of the ice is shaking, the shaking of the ground being pushed, and how terrible it was that my legs were shaking from the earthquake.”

While the arena did not collapse and the tsunami did not reach the area, the water pipes burst under the ice, flooding the building and making it unusable.

Meanwhile, Hanyu’s parents’ home has suffered some shock damage, which means the young skater and his family had to spend time in a makeshift evacuation center set up in a gymnasium.

A month after the tragedy, he said: “In the middle, a lot of people have helped us a lot, so I would like to do anything for them – what I can do is just ski.”

Snowboarder Yuzuru Hanyu continues a record-breaking short program with …

Support from Arakawa

However, skiing will not be easy in the wake of the devastation wrought by an earthquake and tsunami.

With the Sendai Ice Rink coming out – it won’t reopen until July – a new training base had to be found.

Hanyu ended up moving to Hashino City at first – a three-hour drive away; Later, his ski club moved to Yokohama, near Tokyo, more than 300 kilometers from Sendai and away from failed nuclear power plants.

While contemplating his future in sports, Turin 2006 women’s singles champion Arakawa Shizuoka – who had attended the same high school as Hanyu was attending – encouraged him to continue skating.

“After the earthquake and tsunami, I couldn’t skate, and I seriously thought about quitting smoking because I spent my entire hand earning a living, and surviving. Lots of people have helped me and I am now here today,” he said after winning his first Olympic title in Sochi 2014 .

“Shizuoka was skiing with me and she made a donation for me and that’s why I’m here.”

Given its renewed vitality and hope, he skated in ice shows for the weeks that followed – partly as training. Over the following months, it skated at around 60 galleries.

Arakawa’s support has in turn motivated him to continuously pay this amount to the affected community.

Relax and enjoy close to 45 minutes of Yuzuru Hanyu with every performance …

“Make every day count.”

Even now, 10 years after the disaster, Hanyu continues to help the affected area in addition to his ice rink.

Royalties and a portion of the proceeds from my resume, Blue Flames (2012) and Blue Flames II (2016), are geared toward maintaining the Sendai ice rink.

He also participated in several charity TV shows and ice shows to raise money for the victims, and in 2015 he was selected as a spokesperson for the Japanese Red Cross for recovery efforts.

At PyeongChang 2018, after successfully defending his Olympic title, skate into his parade party routine as a tribute to the victims of the disaster.

There is no doubt that disaster remains a major part of Hanyu as he seeks a third straight Olympic crown in 2022, which if achieved would make him the first man to do so in nearly a century.

“I can still see clearly everything when the rink is damaged,” Hanyu wrote in Blue Flames.

“I want to make every day matter now. I want to make every day normal, every ice show, every training and every competition.”

“This is what I have been thinking the most since the day of the earthquake.”

It is those vivid memories that have kept Hanyu and will continue to do so.

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