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Daisuke Takahashi Road to Sochi
[Between Calm and Passion] Translation by our kind Iz Wind
Daisuke Takahashi: Leaving skating behind and moving on to a new training endeavor “I want to change myself”.
Jan 27, 2015
It has been three months since I officially announced my retirement. The days when I was competing feel like a long time ago. During those years I had to practice from the day after the new year’s day and had none of any festive spirit of the time, but this year I enjoyed a fine time of the new year’s celebration for the first time in years and it was a reminder that I am no longer competing.
Before I had one day off a week but now I have Saturday and Sunday off and I practice only when I feel like it. The corns on my feet are gone. No one tells me anything if I don’t go to practice and that also is a token that I am no longer a competitive athlete.
I was surprised that I am not feeling strange with myself not skating in the competitions, and I don’t miss it either. Now right in the middle of the season I'm not watching competitions but I am happy seeing
many young skaters one after another coming out who are able to compete at world level and I simply support them.
[[The joy of meeting the expectations]]
I have a few more shows scheduled at this time, but after that I am going to stay away from skating to have a "life training" period in the States for a while. My main objective is to learn English so I don’t have any definite time frame for it. I am still in search of what city or area to choose but the reason why I have picked the US is that it is easy to adjust to life there for one, and it seems to be a good place to learn dancing, to see stages and arts and to get stimulated by its cultural and ethnic diversity.
I have a passive and inactive nature which keeps me relying on others and got very little social experience, and therefore I want to place myself in some demanding environment so that I can gain power and judgment skills to act positively on my own with no foot-dragging. I am not going to do things particularly for the
sake of figure skating and I will take a good look into what my true feelings toward skating from the bottom up.
The truth is, for the last two years of my competitive career, I sometimes questioned myself if I really like skating. Personally, I think I was skating more for the joy to meet the expectations of others than for the ove of skating itself. Probably that made me worry too much about those expectations and the change of
the time to the point where I lost my self-confidence, and in the end I could not get myself motivated. I admit that might have hastened my retirement. After the Sochi Olympics was over, my heart was exhausted and the passion for skating never came back. My decision to leave skating once altogether must be good for this purpose as well, to recover the confidence I lost.
[[Emptied it to make a room for the next]]
I decided to put the honest thoughts and feelings like that in the book I just wrote, 2000 Days , and leave them all behind. Some parts of it may have contents that are harsh to the readers or to my fans. However, by getting all the true feelings out in the open in a form of a book I think I can empty myself and
finally go on to the next stage. After it was released I can frankly and publicly speak out my thoughts that I could not share before and I now feel so refreshed with my heart feeling light like a load has been lifted off it.
I skated in the shows after I retired and it is true that I found it fun to skate in front of people. It is the most natural thing I can do of all other jobs. But I would rather not be called “professional” skater, and I feel more comfortable with just a “figure” skater with the stance to enjoy being one for a short period of time before going to the States. I believe that the real change should happen after I move there. I feel that I can’t change myself without going out there to have life training, therefore in the meantime I would act simply as I feel and my job title is not really an issue. I have no vision of my future self, and I have anxiety of course. But I have a strong desire to change and the great anticipation of my renewed self.
I would like to find something I can truly feel fulfillment and face sincerity with as much energy as I had been pouring as a competitive skater.
[[To learn what it is to lose]]
The 20 years of my competing in this sport have passed like a flash, and especially the last 10 years, that is, after I started to have a strong awareness of a competitive athlete, were the time far beyond my imagination. All that happened in those years are my assets that created me the way I am, and if I hadn’t been skating I would never even come to Tokyo and might have become a gloomier person, always looking down (LOL).
A good thing about having a competing life this long is to learn what it is to lose. In one’s life, at times you don’t get any results no matter how hard you work for it. Since I spontaneously learned that, I think I can hang in without giving up easily for my life in the future.
For these four years since after the Vancouver Olympics, I am really thankful for the supports from all. Just as the title says, I was in “between calm and passion”. It is neither good to be too cool nor too hot. I have been feeling that it is the hardest thing to make a progress balancing these two. This article is a closure of this series at this point. I see things around me coming to an end one by one. And to me presently, it just would be even better to lose all and everything in a big bang to move on to the next step.
So I won’t be on this paper for quite some time, but see you some day.
(Based on the interview, composed by Naoko Kashiwagi, Photo by Shinichi Watanabe /Sankei Express)
thank you
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