Do we like Yuzuru Hanyu?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and he comes across as decent, but the pages I could open were few, so I'm holding back from a 9.
Hanyu is a two-time Olympic champion who ended his 12-year competitive career at 27. He then said he would carry on as a professional skater outside competitions. At the press conference he said he hoped there would be more chances to show off his skating, which is a low-key way to leave the top of a sport.
The one real stoush on his record is a media one, not a scandal of his own making. When his marriage ended in late 2023, he put out a statement saying various media outlets were “slandering, stalking, and conducting unauthorised interviews”. That was his account, and he said he found it extremely hard to protect himself and his partner at the time.
On the harm test, I searched for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and came up empty. The only hits on LGBTQ+ topics were gossip pages speculating about his private life, which are junk and stay out of this column. No campaigning, no conspiracy slide, no culture-war grifting, and no reporting of him working with people who push that stuff.
I couldn't open the pages on his rink rivalry with Denis Ten or his charity shows, so I'm not retelling them here. Search results suggest he has put on benefit shows for disaster-hit communities, but I couldn't read an article to confirm the details. Take that as a lead, not a finding.
So the picture is a skater with no known history of harmful words or acts and no cases against him. The one noisy chapter is him complaining about intrusive media. That's honestly the whole list, and it's a short one, which is why I've gone for a solid 8 rather than a gushing 10.