The quadruple axel seems to be haunting Yuzuru Hanyu.
The Japanese figure skating superstar announced ahead of the Beijing Olympics that he intends to attempt the jump (4A for short) in Thursday’s free skate. But he admitted at his first practice upon arriving that the jump was “echoing inside me, 4A, 4A, 4A.”
“The Olympic stage is a huge competition and it makes me nervous,” Hanyu told reporters earlier this week.
The quad axel is the only quad jump that has never been landed in competition, and Hanyu has not yet even landed it in practice in Beijing. Placed back in 17th due to his falter in the short program earlier in the week, the Olympic gold medalist may no longer be contention to win the gold. But that won’t stop him from attempting something historic.
“He wants to be the first. He wants to be known as a legend, not just because he won Olympic gold medal, but because he was the first to land the hardest jump to ever be landed,” Jackie Wong, a figure skating analyst for the Rocker Skating website, told DW.
“Nobody has ever done it before, and it’s very unlikely that anybody is going to do it every time soon.”
This Olympic Games, especially on the ice, is about challenging the impossible. The record breaking short program by Nathan Chen, known as the “Quad King,” was a performance for the history books. As was 15-year-old Russian Kamila Valieva’s free skate on Monday, which featured the first ever quadruple jump by a female skater.
But not everyone is fond of the quad revolution that has taken place in men’s and women’s figure skating and some are concerned where the sport is heading.
What is a quad jump?
There are six different types of jumps in figure skating: the axel, flip, Lutz, loop, toe loop, and Salchow. Jumps are then categorized based on how many spins a skater does.
The axel is the most difficult because it is the only jump where a skater begins facing forward, making it difficult for skaters to get the momentum to complete the jump.
Triple jumps, once unthinkable, are now standard in figure skating, according to Wong. “You can’t be anywhere near competitive, even in domestic competitions, without triple jumps. Quads for the men are imperative. All the top guys in the world are doing at least one quad.”
In 2018, Chen made history when he landed six quads during his free skate routine, earning him his ‘Quad King’ moniker. But Wong says that, while the American has become the public face of the quad revolution, its origins go further back than that.
Nathan Chen has made quad jumps a normal part of men’s figure skating
“When you look at the history of skating over the past 10 years, it really started with Patrick Chan in 2012,” Wong told DW. “He was the first one to have both consistent quad jumps and really good basic skating and it really separated him from the rest of the pack.”
Chen, he says, has revolutionized the sport in the last five years with “multiple quads and multiple different quads.”
But though Chen has five different quad jumps in his routine, the one missing is the quad axel. Though Hanyu has been his fiercest competitor in recent years, he told DW he still hopes the Japanese superstar can do it.
“Whatever he can do to push the sport forward is something we are all aiming for, so that would be amazing,” Chen said.
Are quads good for figure skating?
Because he’s been the face of the quad revolution for many years, Chen has also stopped concerning himself with the athleticism vs. artistry debate in figure skating.
Kamila Valieva has set a new bar for female figure skating
“At this point in time, I really love what I do,” he told DW. “I love the elements and the programs I’m able to do, and I’m trying to do the very best that I can. So I’ll just try to keep enjoying it.”
But the debate rages on, especially with Valieva pushing the boundaries on the women’s side. Tara Lipinski, the 1998 Olympic champion and an analyst with NBC Sports in the US, wonders if quads should really become routine in a sport where art has always played a part.
“The way things are going, it is going to be very difficult for female skaters who don’t have these quads to compete for a medal,” she told NBC Sports last year. “No one inherently likes change, and this is going to be such a drastic change. I wonder how are you going to balance what figure skating is, the balance between technical and artistic, which has been a problem in our sport forever.”
Wong believes it’s important to preserve the artistry of the sport. “Otherwise you are not talking about figure skating as an all-around package, you’re just talking about the jumps. And there’s so much more to figure skating than just the jumps.”
For all the latest Sports News Click Here
