Athlete profile: Kyoko Shimazaki

Posted: Tue February 3, 1998 at 5:00 PM ET

Athlete notes

The Japanese like to use the word tensai, or genius on a teenage sensation who is extremely gifted with the natural talent...Martina Hingis is a tensai...Kyoko Shimazaki was dubbed a tensai, when she first stormed into the international scene as a high school student...as an 18-year-old, Shimazaki won the overall World Cup title in the 1990-91 season...Shimazaki took over from Seiko Hashimoto as the Japan's premier women's speed skater..."She is a born sprinter," says Tadao Ishihata, who is the coach for Kyoko's company team, Sankyo Seiki, in Japan. "She can work on her start, but her speed form the 100m to the finish is probably the best in the world"...Shimazaki's coach at high school, Toshiyuki Sakai also says, "She was just real smooth, both the weight shifting, and skating. Her talent was very clear"...Shimazaki placed sEventsh overall in the World Cup as a high school girl, then won the overall title the next year...she would always say, "I can't believe this is happening to me"...but now, she just says, "Yeah, there was a time like that," and refuses to look back at the past glory...Shimazaki hates being called a tensai... "It really drives me mad to be just put aside by one word," says Shimazaki. "I trained real hard, pushing and pushing until I was almost destroying myself"...she wants to say that she did not do it with talent alone...the shocking debut was just prior to the Albertville Olympics, and whether she wanted it or not, the expectations became very high... "People thought I was supposed to win, and I sort of lost the freedom," remembers Shimazaki. "I was always thinking about quitting, in between the words of responsibility and duty. I was not skating for myself"...in the 500m in Albertville, she finished at sEventsh place...Shimazaki went into a long tunnel since then, until the 1997 season when she won her first World Cup race in six seasons...Shimazaki was born in January 1972 in Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese main island that was about to host the Sapporo Olympics...she was a premature baby who weighed 1,650 grams (3.68 pounds), and prone to get sick as a child...so Shimazaki started skating to strengthen her health...but by the time when Shimazaki was in junior high school, she was enjoying the company of her teammates, and she was actually having fun skating, but without any outstanding results...Shimazaki would start appearing on the newspapers in the high school years... "Winning was a given," says Shimazaki. "I didn't even think about losing"...Shimazaki broke Seiko Hashimoto's high school records over and over...in her last year in high school, Shimazaki told Sakai, that she wanted to "quit skating"...she wanted to become a graphic designer..."I told her to rethink and rethink, but the answer was always no," says Sakai. "It took me more than 10 days to convince her"...Shimazaki says, "I was skating without a reason to skate. I did not have the freedom to quit"...after graduating and the World Cup title, Shimazaki was still unsure if she truly enjoyed what she was doing...coach Ishihata says, "Her heart couldn't keep up with ‘Shimazaki' the record holder"...there was a struggle with health...Shimazaki is still very prone to catch a cold with her weak tonsils -- it required two surgeries right before the Lillehammer Olympics -- where she placed only 10th in the 500 and 18th in the 1,000...her training schedule had been so switched around by injury that Shimazaki found it hard to shift back to the physical condition she needed to compete... "I had to do some extreme things and that kind of training just takes a lot of toll out of your body," says Shimazaki...and she would not be able to practice again, falling into a cycle...demanding perfection in her own skating, "unsatisfactory performances became stress"...frustration abounded, and that was another reason why she was not performing well...in the 1996 season, Shimazaki finally realized that she was "too sensitive to the outside noise"... when she won her first World Cup in six seasons, she said, "it was like winning the first time"...in Nagano, Shimazaki wants to "skate faster than anyone, with style"... Shimazaki's parents still live in Obihiro, and Kyoko only sees her parents twice a year...her father is an architect, while her mother is a waitress in a Chinese restaurant...