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the-real-xmonster:

He might’ve said something along that line, yes. He was very unhappy with his free skate back in Sochi. He also reflected, later on, that when he won Gold, he was conflicted, thinking back to the disaster that struck his hometown in March 2011 and wondering if his victory here would actually do any good at all for the people who were still suffering from the aftermath, and if it didn’t, if him being an Olympic champion had any meaning beside his own selfishness.  

I will say this, though, that absolutely nobody in the world has the license to say that any of Yuzu’s accomplishments is undeserved, not even Yuzu himself. The last few days I have been quite outraged by some opinions I saw on forums, on blogs, and even on mainstream media, seeking to downplay his achievements.

So let me make this clear. When you say Yuzuru Hanyu is a two-time Olympic Champion, you stop there, if you don’t have anything else better to say about it. Full stop. 

If you insist on tagging on the but: but he didn’t win the free skate in PyeongChang, but he made mistakes both times at the Olympics, but he has been inconsistent and not completely infallible to losing, so on and so forth. Then I hope you are fully prepared to, after that, tag on the despite. Despite multiple career-threatening injuries, despite going into PyeongChang having restarted practice only mere weeks before, despite constantly facing pressure so great it is sheer unimaginable and almost inhuman to ask any normal young adult in their twenties to cope with (oh yes, don’t you ever forget that he was shouldering the expectation of an entire nation, because if you think that Nathan Chen was under too much pressure it affected his performance, then do consider that, had Nathan won Gold, he still wouldn’t have received a congratulation call from his head of state, even were the POTUS in power a decent human being who is competent at his job). 

But wait, there’s more, because after the but and the despite, there is the also that you should not miss out on, because winning 2 Olympic Golds is not everything Yuzuru Hanyu has done in the last Olympic cycle, far from it. He has also won 2 World Championships, medaled at two more, added 4 Grand Prix Final wins in a row to his resume, landed a quadruple jump nobody before him had succeeded in competition, stayed on top of the World Standings since December 2013. It was also from that date onward that every World Scoring Record in the men’s single discipline has been set and broken by him and him alone, 12 times.   

You might not agree that he is the Greatest of All Time, I don’t care, who the GOAT in this sport is, only time and history will tell. But you do not get to downplay his achievements.