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Yuzuru Hanyu entered the free skate at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics looking to make history despite being in eighth position after the short program. But the two-time Olympic Champion wasn’t going to let a little thing like gravity or the laws of science try to stop him from making history in China.
The Japanese skater let it all hang out anyway, and attempted to land the most difficult jumps in the history of men’s figure skating as well as the Olympics. He just came up a bit short, but not for lack of effort. Hanyu just missed both a quad axel and a quad salchow, but he was ohsoclose.
Here’s the axel attempt.
4А Он пытался
— . (@siopvvngs) February 10, 2022
На самом деле какой был бы момент если бы он его сделал#фигурноекатание #figureskating #YuzuruHanyu pic.twitter.com/cqfFWtaCmX
The quad axel is particularly challenging because the skater enters the jump moving forward, but lands backwards for a total of actually 4.5 rotations. And because of switch from an outside edge to an inside edge, no one has ever landed the salchow in Olympic competition.