Yuzuru Hanyu's new (old) programs sound like a broken record. Same old, same old doesn't befit his skating genius

Yuzuru Hanyu in his short program to a Chopin Ballade at the 2018 Olympics. He is about to re-use it for the fourth time. (Getty Images)

I am going to start my discussion about Yuzuru Hanyu’s decision to recycle old programs with an effort (undoubtedly futile) to stave off an uprising by the Hanyubots, the unhinged slice of Hanyu’s huge and generally terrific fan base that turns into a cult to troll anyone who ventures a legitimate criticism of the skater they worship.

I can only hope they will read at least the next four paragraphs before beginning a knee-jerk rant, as they usually do when, for instance, Hanyu gets scores they deem unfair:

1.  Hanyu is one of the two greatest men’s skaters of all time and unquestionably the greatest in the last 68 years.  (For more on who is the G.O.A.T., see my story from the 2018 Winter Olympics.)

2.  Hanyu, now 25, deserves immense praise for pushing himself through two seasons of injuries (2018 and 2019) to take a shot at a third Olympic gold medal.

3.  Hanyu deserves the biggest of props for pushing the technical envelope – his own and that of the sport’s history – by planning, according to one of his coaches, an attempt at a quadruple axel at the World Championships in March.  To my knowledge, only one person, Russia’s Artur Dmitriev, has attempted the jump in competition, at the 2018 Rostelecom Cup, where the tech panel downgraded it to a triple.

(Whether the 4 ½-revolution jump becomes Hanyu’s white whale is another question.  His obsession over mastering a quadruple Lutz, which he now has done, led to an injury that seriously compromised his training for the 2018 Olympics.)

4.  Hanyu has become a transcendent, long-lasting phenomenon in a sport that badly needs his star power.  This is, almost incredibly, the Japanese skater’s 10th competitive season at the senior international level; by the second, at age 16, he had become a world bronze medalist.  His achievements since then are colossal: two Olympic golds, two world golds (and three silvers), four Grand Prix Final golds and a passel of best-ever scores.  In 32 international individual competitions since the 2013 worlds, when he placed fourth, he has won 18 and finished below second just once.

Is that enough evidence of the esteem in which I hold Hanyu?  (And all of which I have said many times before?)

Is it enough so no one will go bonkers when I say it is disappointing that he has decided to return to old program music – and, effectively, old programs - he already has used ad nauseum?

So far this season, Hanyu has been using the same programs as last year, with the understandable reason that an injury allowed him to perform them just four times in 2018-19.

Now Hanyu has decided heading into this week’s Four Continents Championships in Seoul that it’s golden oldies time, back to the programs that he used to win the second Olympic title in 2018. . .when they already were reruns.

Many skaters re-use programs in more than one season.  But Hanyu is taking that practice to a disconcerting level, and it does not befit his genius.

The new-old short program, to Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, provides a haunting, minor key palette for his ability to project sensitive, understated movement.

But this will be its fourth reprise:  2014-15, 2015-16, 2017-18, second half of 2019-20.  He has already performed it about a dozen times in international competition.

The new-old long program, “Seimei,” from the soundtrack of a 2003 movie about a legendary Japanese spiritual advisor, also plays well with Hanyu’s emotional expressiveness.

But this will be its third reprise:  2015-16, 2017-18, second half of 2019-20, with fewer performances (about eight.)

Given that most skaters often keep the same elements no matter what music they use (and no one seems to care that it’s as incongruous as performing King Lear with the sets and stage direction for Hamlet), the back-to-the-future programs are going to seem more like a case of been there, done that, not again, yawn.

To his credit, Hanyu apparently has made some minor changes.

His long program will necessarily be somewhat different because its length was cut by 30 seconds (and one jumping pass) in a rules change after the 2018 Olympics.  Video of a Wednesday practice showed a short program run-through in which he has swapped the order and placement of jumping passes and spins from what they were at the 2018 Olympics, but the seven elements are the same.

But the music from both programs now is more an annoying earworm than exhilarating entertainment when associated with Hanyu.

Or, to quote the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch: “Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.”

Skating has no rules against such repetition, although it should.  Audiences deserve fresh material, not greatest hits.  And skaters have from April until September to work out new programs.

“To make a strict rule on that could be a great problem for many skaters,” said Fabio Bianchetti of Italy, the International Skating Union technical committee chair for pairs and singles, in an email.

It could, in fact, cause problems for skaters without the money to pay for extensive help from a professional choreographer.  That certainly would not be a problem for a skater of Hanyu’s means.

And who more than an artist-athlete as gifted as Hanyu should be capable of performing to diverse pieces of music?  And when more than in this era when songs with lyrics are allowed, giving every skater a music library of immense scope to borrow from, when there no longer need be 73 skaters in a season doing Carmens, 67 Turandots, 55 Toscas and 25 Otonals.

Could it be that Hanyu’s artistic range is limited to a narrower comfort zone than it seems?

In his 10 senior seasons, he has used six different short program music selections and eight different long program selections (two of the latter eight were based on Romeo and Juliet.)

Yes, a performing artist inhabits a role differently over time, but a gap of more than a few years usually is needed for such development.  Hanyu will have performed the Chopin four times in six years, the Seimei three in five.

Maybe this familiarity will provide the relaxed security for him to avoid the big technical mistakes that have recurred this season and last.

So, is it possible Hanyu will perform his personal old warhorses brilliantly and win both Four Continents and the World Championships, regaining his position as the world’s leading man for the first time since the 2018 Olympics?  Absolutely.

But judges who have seen this all before should be disinclined to award him the component scores they did back in 2015, when he used the Chopin and Seimei together for the first time and gave the greatest, most dazzling back-to-back event short and long program performances in the sport’s history, at both the NHK Trophy and Grand Prix Final (46 of 90 PCS perfect 10’s in the latter.)

Composition and interpretation of the music are two of the five PCS categories.  Do you really reward someone for doing the same old, same old?

Holding Yuzuru Hanyu to a higher standard is a measure of how great he has been.  He can and should be even greater than that.