I do agree somewhat with what Meoima mentioned previously about how over-thinking, overconfidence and over-training seem to be what usually affects Yuzu and after watching what happened yesterday, I came to the same conclusion myself.
Even before the warm up, I was very nervous for his skate because he was so emotional after his short program and you could tell that he was very nervous before both short and long programs. Hearing that he practised so many quads in the morning (does he usually do so many in a row? And all mainly one jump) made me think that he would tire his body out. He seems to do better after being well-rested like at the first practise session on Monday and going into jumps confidently. During the 6 min warm up, he doubled his loop and I was even more anxious from that. He doubled it again in the warm up right before his skate and I knew it would be a bad skate for him even though he landed the 3A, since it's so rare to see him double his loops. That just spells trouble for his salchows and it made him visibly more anxious and I was not surprised at all when he said later that he was not confident in his 4S-3T (in fact, all his salchows had problems). Frankly, I have never seen him so anxious and nervous before a competition as much as he was here and I was surprised when I read that he said he was calm before the start of his program. His demeanor didn't seem calm (in my opinion) but frazzled instead. High-strung. Actually, high-strung is probably the best adjective to describe him this whole week.
I feel like the pressure both from himself and the audience for a PERFECT skate from him was too much for him to handle. I think that he wanted to be perfect much more than he wanted to be first (though being first would come naturally if he skated perfectly). One thing he admires so much about Plushenko was his ability to skate clean so many times and he even asked him about that during the ice show in January. So once he messed up the first jump, he just fell apart (by his standards). The fight that is usually there for him wasn't there last night since he already failed his goal of being perfect after the first jump. Just because of one thing he knew going in that could've made his skate not perfect (4S-3T) affected his whole performance and I thought that he should've went for the 4T-3T instead after all the 4T practice he did that morning and he felt that it wasn't stable. He was over-thinking it right from the start and essentially, the same thing that happened at Nationals happened here. He perhaps should've taken his own advice from after the Nationals skate and just do each element one by one instead of trying to achieve perfection!
Sure, he is just as disappointed as we all are, but I sense now that he is actually relieved after the performance because the pressure is gone.
Of course, these are all just from my perspective and are just my opinion, so don't treat them as facts.
Basically he's always nervous before competition and I think this is a common sense that nearly all athletes are terribly nervous before such a large competition. According to Orser, Hanyu was nervous but not anything unusual. Hanyu himself even said he's quite clam before the show. Probably they missed something, but again, I dunno why we, fans, saw Hanyu like 15 minutes a day (or even less) can tell more than his coach team or even himself? We don't need to always agree with our little prince and his coaches but at least, that conclusion should be drawn with enough evidence.
It's easy to rationalize an argument when we think back and match the nuances to the result. Must there be a necessary causal relationship? No.
Hanyu was emotional to an extent that his facial expression of his ending pose was being teased as a face of devil after NHK SP last year but he made it again in FS. He's not doing very well during the last practice before SP in WC this year also, but we can't say the SP result was bad. Meanwhile, Last year, he was not doing anything weird in practice sessions before FS, but he lost finally.
Don't even mention his lots of practice sessions during lots of competitions he's taken part in previous years. He's not the roller-coaster but he's not definitely stable when we are talking about his performance in practice.
According to his own words, there's a problem of 'unbalance between physical and mental status.' So I am not saying he's perfect or no need to improve, it's just, to me, he knows the causes and it absolutely no evidence showing there are anything as serious as some kind oh mental crisis that let him breakdown in the future.
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Fragile porcelain, wrap him up in cotton wool
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