Beijing Winter Olympics: Eight international athletes to watch – BBC News

An astonishing 19 world records, the youngest men’s figure skating champion at the Winter Olympics since 1948 (2014), seven gold medals at the World Championships and four Grand Prix Finals crowns… In the world of figure skating, there have been There are few honors this Japanese national treasure athlete has not won.

After winning two gold medals in Sochi and Pingchang, Hanyu became the first player since Dick Button in 1948 and 1952 to defend the men’s singles gold medal at the Winter Olympics. In 2021, he was suspended for more than half a year due to injury, and in December, he won the championship in the Japanese Figure Skating Championship (the sixth time for him) and won the qualification for this year’s Winter Olympics.

The outside world believes that his biggest opponent will be the Chinese-American player Nathan Chen. If he can win the championship in Beijing, the national idol who is well-known in Japan will become an unprecedented three-time champion of men’s figure skating at the Winter Olympics. However, because there are no international audiences, the picture of Japanese ice fans throwing Winnie the Pooh toy at Yuzuru Hanyu after the game is expected to not appear.

Winter Olympic skiing champion Mikaela Shiffrin was already a skiing superstar before coming to Beijing. In Sochi in 2014, at the age of 18, she became the youngest Winter Olympic slalom champion, and four years later she won two medals in Pyeongchang, including a gold medal in the Super Giant Slalom.

Shiffrin, 26, holds the most World Cup slalom titles (47) and is the first to complete four consecutive World Championships in the same event. But in the two years before she entered the Beijing Winter Olympics, she experienced the trauma of her father’s sudden and unexpected death, which made her think of giving up her sports career. First season without winning any championships.

But she is still considered a gold favorite in Beijing, who could compete in as many as five events. However, Shiffrin, who has undergone sports psychology therapy, said her goal is to enjoy the game to the fullest: “You can’t control whether you win a medal or not, you can only control how you play, that’s the truth.”

Francesco Friedrich, known as “Franz the Great”, is recognized as one of the best athletes in the history of bobsleigh (also known as “bobsleigh”), with 46 World Cup winner and 13 World Championship titles.

He led a four-person German snowmobile team to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and won two gold medals in a two-person snowmobile and a four-person snowmobile. player. The dominance of the German team and Francisco on this project is evident.

At first, Francisco started training snowmobiles in the footsteps of his elder brother David, who unfortunately retired early due to two serious injuries, but he still supported his younger brother all the way to the top.

“I feel like we’ve made every aspect of the sport better,” Francisco proudly told the Olympics website last year about his and his team’s achievements. In Beijing, he will lead the German snow team to defend the title.

Four years ago in his home country of Pyeongchang, Yin Chengbin, who was playing at home and wearing an “Iron Man” helmet, was a blockbuster. He won the gold with a huge advantage of 1.63 seconds faster than the second place, creating a steel frame snowmobile in the history of the Olympic Games (and The biggest gap between the championship and the runner-up in the project is called the squatting ice pry.

Coming from Namhae County, South Korea, where it almost never snows, Yoon Sungbin didn’t officially start training in bobsleigh sports until he was 18 years old, but he was extremely talented in the 2017-18 bobsleigh World Cup five years later. The first overall champion born in Asia.

His stunning performance at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics not only gave South Korea another winning point in traditional short track speed skating, speed skating and figure skating, but also made him a national idol and Korean sports player. A business card for the world. His domineering performance on the field and his tough temperament off the field gave him the nickname “The Ice King”.

However, after winning the bronze medal in the 2019 World Championships, due to the new crown epidemic, the South Korean team withdrew from the World Cup as a whole, and Yoon Sungbin did not participate in any competitions for nearly 11 months. During this period, the players of the German team swept the World Cup and World Championship titles, among which Christopher Grotheer achieved 2 consecutive World Championships after winning the championship in 2020, which is regarded as the winner of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Gold is hot.

In this regard, Yin Chengbin said that “everyone is facing a difficult situation” under the epidemic, and his primary goal in Beijing is to “enjoy the game to the fullest.”

The dominance of the German women’s sled team at the Winter Olympics is unquestionable, winning all women’s singles sleds since Nagano in 1998, while Natalie Geisenberger, 33 ) is the player with the most medals in the history of the sport, also known as “lug.”

Geisenberg, who started summer sled training at the age of 10, has won 14 Junior World Cup titles, three overall Junior World Cup titles and six Junior World Championships since he became a junior athlete. After winning bronze at her first Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, she won gold medals in both the women’s single sled and team relay in Sochi and Chang, and was the first to hold six FIL World Cup titles. female player. She joins fellow German men Tobias Arlt and Tobias Wendl and is the most successful athlete in the history of the sport.

In May 2020, Geisenberg gave birth to his son Leo, who remained strong after his comeback and finally won the World Cup championship in the 2020-21 season. Beijing is her fourth and possibly last Winter Olympics.

Chloe Kim, born in Long Beach, California, became the youngest champion at the age of 14 when she won gold at the 2015 X Games. At the PyeongChang Winter Olympics four years ago, she was astonished and won the gold medal in the snowboard U-shaped field event at the age of 17. She was the youngest women’s snowboard champion in the history of the Winter Olympics, and she also achieved the gold medal at the Olympic Games. The youngest female player in the 1080 flip for two weeks.

As a second-generation immigrant whose parents are both Korean, and there are still many relatives living in South Korea, Chloe Kim was very popular with the Korean people at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, and even the Korean media reported her with her Korean name.” Kim Sun” to call her.

Now, Chloe King is the defending champion of the U-shaped field event at the Winter Olympics, the World Championships and the World X Games, and it is expected that she will continue her dominant performance at the Beijing Winter Olympics. The 21-year-old recently spoke to the media about the pressures of being an Olympic gold medalist and her need to focus on her mental health. However, after taking a break for nearly two years, she won the championship in only two events she participated in in the past season.

Schultin’s original main project was not a short-distance project. Her home country, the Netherlands, is the most successful country in speed skating in the history of the Winter Olympics, having won 42 gold medals, and Schulting’s original main event was speed skating. Until one day, one of her coaches asked her to go to the short-track venue to practice cornering skills, but she fell in love with this project all of a sudden.

At the World Short Track Speed ​​Skating Championships last March, Suzanne Schulting won gold in all events – including the first women’s team relay title in Dutch history. She is the fourth speed skater in history to swept all the gold medals at the World Championships, and the second woman to do so.

However, this result was won without the traditional short-track speed skating powerhouses South Korea, China and Canada sending teams to participate under the new crown epidemic.

So far, Schulting is still not the strongest in short distances. In 2019 and 2020 she was the world number one in the 1000m and 1500m, but in the 500m she was still out of the top five in the world prior to last year’s World Championships – as a long distance speed skater , she has not yet had an absolute advantage in this sprint event that often finishes within 40 seconds.

However, as the defending champion of the 1,000-meter Winter Olympics, Schulting will also participate in long-distance speed skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics, so she will be aiming for medals in multiple events. Maybe she may not be able to sweep all the championships in Beijing again, but it is an amazing achievement to appear on the track of so many events to compete.

At the 2018 World Junior Figure Skating Championships, Alexandra Trusova, who was only 14 years old at the time, won the championship by an absolute advantage, becoming the first person in the world to successfully complete the quad jump and women who completed two quadruple jumps in the official free skating competition.

For the next two years, she was the defending junior world champion before winning her first appearance in the senior category. Now 17 years old, she is known for her difficult quadruple jump technique, and now has the nickname of “Quad Jump Queen”.

In 2021, she will compete in the US Grand Prix of Figure Skating after a brief recuperation. Injured, she reduced the difficulty of jumping in the free skating competition, but still won the championship with an absolute advantage of 15 points ahead of the second place in the total score. She told the media after the game: “I’m not in the best shape now. I hope to recover as soon as possible and participate in the Olympic Games.”

The scary thing is that Trusova is not necessarily the strongest in the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) women’s figure skating team. She lost to two compatriots Anna Shcherbakova and Elizaveta Tuktamysheva at the 2021 World Championships. At the Russian National Championships at the end of the year, she lost to Kamila Valieva, a 15-year-old super-beautiful girl who set a world record.

In the roster of the Russian Olympic Committee’s figure skating team announced on January 21, Valieva, Shcherbakova and Trusova are all listed. The outside world generally believes that the Russian Olympic Committee athletes taking the top three women’s singles are “no suspense”, and the real focus will be what kind of difficult movements and god-level performances they will perform to present a visual feast.