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Japan's Teen Skating Sensations The Olympic Winter Games will be an occasion for all the people of the world--men and women, young and old--to come together in friendly competition. Some of the youngest competitors will be on Japan's figure skating squad. In all, four students from the same high school have been selected to represent their country in the singles and pairs skating events. Two of them, Takeshi Honda and Yamato Tamura, will be the first male high schoolers to figure skate for Japan since the 1976 Innsbruck Games. They'll be joined in Nagano by Shizuka Arakawa, who'll compete in the women's singles event, and Marie Arai, a skater in the pairs competition.
Takeshi Honda is not only a young skater; he also got a late start in his sport. He didn't enter his first tournament until he was nine years old, when he could barely make a half spin in midair. Now, only seven years later, he is one of the few skaters in the world who can successfully do a quadruple midair spin in practice! In March 1997, he went up against the best in the world and took tenth place at the World Championships held in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was named to the Olympic team in September; his three schoolmates were chosen following the Japanese championships in December.
Yamato Tamura is also trying to master the difficult quadruple spin. He's a powerful jumper--maybe because his parents named him after a mountain (yama) in the hope that he would go high in life. In the December championships he skated an excellent final round, coming from behind to win the tournament and a place on the national team.
Also coming from behind to become national champion was Shizuka Arakawa, who took first place at this season's Asian championships as well. A year earlier she had fallen from first place to lose the Japanese tournament, but this year she skated flawlessly. She landed a tough jump combination--two consecutive triple spins--to win herself a ticket to Nagano. Marie Arai is the only one of the four Tohoku High School students to come from Miyagi Prefecture, where the school is located. The school has such a strong skating program it attracts promising competitors from all over Japan. Marie, who won this year's All-Japan tournament, will be paired with 24-year-old Shin Amano in the Olympics. All the skaters will go on to the World Championships, to be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the end of March.
