Yuzuru Hanyu: Winter Babies

January is generally a quiet Yuzu month and with no special winter Yuzu ice shows announced, we are all anxiously awaiting for 4CC to see Yuzu compete again.

During GPF, there were a number of birthday announcements in the arena, and I had a conversation with a friend about birthdays and how many skaters had birthdays in the winter.  So, I decided to do a bit of review on this to see what kind of trends would appear. Nothing about the results or my trend analysis in this blog entry is scientific, it’s all just for fun!

For the purposes of this blog entry, I am defining “winter babies” as anyone born between October 1 and March 31st.  I am basing “winter” on a Canadian winter.  Brrrr.

I thought – wouldn’t it be great if it worked out that all world champions were winter babies??  Well, the results weren’t that perfect, but it was kinda of cool that the majority of skaters listed below are in fact, winter babies!

In addition, some interesting trends were noted:

• With the one exception of Mao Asada (Sept), all recent women Japanese National champions are winter babies going all the way back to the 1996-97 season.  That’s 20 years!
• On the mens side, for the past 21 years (back to 1995-96 season), Japan has only had 2 skaters that won Japan Nationals that were not winter babies (Yamato Tamura (May) and Yosuke Takeuchi (Aug)).
• December seems to be the most popular month for skating babies!

Source: Japan National Champion winners

While I am not going through the entire ISU list of skaters, I have selected the most prominent current and recent skaters that came to my mind and my favourites of course. If I have missed any key skaters, you can let me know in the comments section and I can add them.

October Babies

• Boyang Jin              Oct 3, 1997
• Jun Hwan-Cha      Oct 21, 2001

November Babies

• Evgenia Medvedeva   Nov 19, 1999
• Kanako Murakami      Nov 7, 1994
• Evgeny Plushenko      Nov 3, 1982

December Babies

• Kaitlyn Osmond                  Dec 5, 1995
• Yuzu Hanyu                        Dec 7, 1994
• Megan Duhamel                 Dec 8, 1985
• Zijun Li                                  Dec 14, 1996
• Jason Brown                         Dec 15, 1994
• Courtney Hicks                   Dec 15, 1995
• Sportymags                        Dec 16, xxxx
• Shoma Uno                           Dec 17, 1997
• Elizaveta Tuktamysheva   Dec 17, 1996
• Brian Orser                            Dec 18, 1961
• Miki Ando                              Dec 18, 1987
• Chisato Shiina                     Dec 28, 1982
• Shizuka Arakawa                 Dec 29, 1981
• Fumie Siguri                         Dec 31, 1980
• Patrick Chan                         Dec 31, 1990

January Babies

• Meryl Davis               Jan 1, 1987
• Xiaoyu Yu                   Jan 2, 1996
• Wakaba Higuchi       Jan 2, 2001
• Elena Radionova      Jan 6, 1999
• Sota Yamamoto        Jan 10, 2000
• Gabrielle Daleman   Jan 13, 1998
• Eric Radford               Jan 27, 1985

February Babies

• Sergei Grinkov          Feb 4, 1967
• Takahito Mura          Feb 11, 1991
• Yuka Sato                   Feb 14, 1973
• Mikhail Kolyada        Feb 18, 1995
• Takahiko Kozuka      Feb 27, 1989

March Babies

• Han Yan                       Mar 6, 1996
• Tatsuki Machida        Mar 9, 1990
• Daisuke Takahashi    Mar 16, 1986
• Alexei Yagudin           Mar 18, 1980
• Takeshi Honda           Mar 23, 1981
• Satoko Miyahara       Mar 26, 1998
• Alaine Chartrand      Mar 26, 1996
• Nobinari Oda              Mar 25, 1987
• Akiko Suzuki              Mar 28, 1985

Summer Babies

• Stephane Lambiel      Apr 2, 1985
• Anna Pogorilaya           Apr 10, 1998
• Javier Fernandez        Apr 15, 1991
• Nathan Chen               May 5, 1999
• Misha Ge                       May 17, 1991
• Nam Nguyen               May 20, 1998
• Ekaterina Gordeeva   May 28, 1971
• Julia Lipnitskaya        June 5, 1998
• Kurt Browning            June 18, 1966
• Mao Asada                    Sept 25, 1990

 

So, this was an interesting exercise to do for fun.  I’m happy to be a winter baby among all the greats listed above (especially December)!

 

Go Yuzu Go!!!  Doki Doki!!