The Player Who Broke Competitive Yo-Yo

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This is Hajime Miura. And in a few moments, he is about to completely and utterly blow the minds   of the hundreds of spectators gathered here today  to watch the 2019 World Yo-Yo Contest finals. After his performance, the last of the night, the results come in. Third place: Yuki Uchida, a clutch finish by the Japanese yo-yo  player who eek-ed out his best placement to date  by just one-tenth of a point. Second place: Tsubasa Onishi, a veteran of the 4A division  who could now boast a staggering total  of nine top-three 4A finishes at Worlds. And finally, the first place announcement. As the audience awaits the final result, chatters in the crowd begin to swell ever-so-slightly. Understandably, this is because the 2019 4A world champion is about to be declared. But, keen observers have also noticed that the placements so far don’t quite seem to add up. Presumably, first place is about to go to Hajime Miura; it just seems inevitable. But where does that leave Rei Iwakura? Rei is the most decorated 4A yo-yo player of all-time, and in this moment, holds five 4A world champion titles under his belt. This year, he was no slouch,  and while his performance may not have been as electrifying as Hajime’s, his yo-yo mastery is  still extremely polished and highly technical.   It would be quite unfortunate if he had somehow  slipped down to the fourth place position. slipped down to the fourth place position. (Congratulations, Japan!) (Rei Iwakura!) Yo-yos are one of history's oldest known toys.   Dating as far back as Ancient Greece, intermittent  records of individuals playing with a disc   attached to a string have cropped up  throughout the history of humanity.   There have been ebbs and flows in how the  yo-yo has developed over the years, but our   story today starts in the early ‘90s, during  the advent of modern competitive yo-yoing. In 1992, the first recurring, annual  Yo-Yo Championship was held at the   International Jugglers' Association convention  in Montreal, Canada. Six years later, in 1998,   the yo-yo community broke free from the jugglers  and formed their own, independent event, the   World Yo-Yo Championships. From there, the event  would be rebranded two more times, first becoming   the “World Yo-Yo Competition” in 1999, and then  later the “World Yo-Yo Contest” in the year 2000,   the name that would ultimately stick. And thanks to a wave of interest surrounding modern yo-yoing   during this time, the competitive yo-yoing scene  continued to grow. By 2013, the annual contest was   now overseen by an official, global governing  body, the International Yo-Yo Federation. In competitive yo-yoing, there are  five primary categories of play,   named 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, and… 5A, respectively. The first category, 1A, is yo-yo play at its most  conventional. We all know, fundamentally, what 1A   yo-yoing is, because we are all familiar with how  a basic yo-yo works. That being said, you would   be surprised by how far people have been able to  push tricks with just a basic, standard yo-yo. In 1998, the second category, 2A, joined  the fold. 2A is the natural extension of 1A:   you have two hands, why not use two  yo-yos? However, note that in the 2A style,   each yo-yo operates mutually-exclusive from one  another, looping in a variety of different ways,   but never directly into one another. So, to remedy this, we introduce the third category, 3A. In 3A, two yo-yos are once again in play, but now,  they must interweave and compound together   to create complex and elaborate string tricks.  The 3A division arguably houses one of the most   technical styles of yo-yo play, and is Hajime  Miura’s primary category of competition. Next, we have 4A, or “off-string” yo-yo.  Performances in 4A involve a lot of airtime on  the part of the yo-yo, one of the main benefits  of no longer being beholden to the string. One side-effect of the unstrung nature of  the 4A style is that there is no apparent   limit to the number of yo-yos that can be  used at once. This enables competitors to   perform special tricks using two yo-yos instead  of the ordinary one yo-yo, using a specialized   technique known as “soloham.” Finally, there is 5A: a freehand,   counterweight-based style of yo-yoing, in  which the yo-yo is no longer tied to the   player’s finger, and is instead balanced out by  a small weight at the other end of the string. And now we’re up to speed  on modern competitive yo-yoing,   I strongly recommend checking it out. Hajime Miura is God’s smile shining  onto the world of yo-yo. Born in 2003,   Hajime began to play yo-yo when he was just seven  years-old after attending a local yo-yo event.   A year later, he had picked up the 3A yo-yoing  style, which he used to win his first notable   competition, the 2012 West Japan Yo-Yo  Contest. Only two short years later, in 2014,   Hajime Miura completed an incredibly prestigious  “grand slam” tournament run, winning a national,   multinational, and world yo-yo competition  all in one year. And he did this at the impressive age of only 10 years-old. Hajime’s World Yo-Yo Contest victory in 2014 ended the three-year-long winning streak of the defending world champion,   Hank Freeman, who, up until earlier that year, had  been an obvious shoe-in for first place. During   his three-year reign, Hank’s 3A performances had  towered in quality compared to his competitors,   resulting in an average margin of victory of  almost 10 points (out of 100) over each past   year’s second place player. But in 2014, Hajime  gave Hank a taste of his own medicine, coming   out of the blue to beat the once unstoppable  3A threepeat-holder by a handsome 9.9 points.   And, of course, 2014 was just the beginning. Hajime’s dominance in 3A is the most  long-standing, active dynasty to currently exist   in competitive yo-yoing across all styles of play,  with his current reign making up over one-third of   the entire history of 3A world champions. His  six-time World Yo-Yo Contest winning streak is   tied for the longest world champion title streak  in the history of modern competitive yo-yoing,   matched only by Shinji Saito’s six-year run  in the 2A division from 2002 to 2007. And as   a cherry-on-top, Hajime’s performances make up a  spotless World Yo-Yo Contest resume, with every   single one of Hajime’s 3A appearances resulting  in a first-place finish, making him six-for-six.   It is wholly uncontroversial to state  that, as of right now, Hajime Miura is   the greatest 3A yo-yo player of all-time. But this story isn’t about the 2019 3A finals.   Hajime was already slated to win that division,  and he did, impressively and unsurprisingly. Hajime Miura first dipped his toes into 4A  competition the year following his first 3A World   Yo-Yo Contest victory. That year, in 2015, he won  first place at a regional yo-yo contest in Japan,   and placed fourth at the Japan National Yo-Yo  Contest. Two years later, at the multinational   2017 Asia Pacific Yo-Yo Championship, he swept  both the 3A and 4A divisions for first place.   But it wasn’t until the 2018 World Yo-Yo  Contest that Hajime would first bring his   4A yo-yoing talents to the big stage. That year, Hajime did the unthinkable,   accompanying his 3A victory with an  incredible win in the 4A division as well. This dual accomplishment makes him  the first and only yo-yo player to ever   win two separate championship  divisions in one year. As it turns out, Shohei Ohtani is  not the only once-in-a-lifetime,   two-way phenom to come out of Japan. So, coming into 2019, expectations are set   high: if there’s one thing that you’re  looking out for at this World Yo-Yo Contest,   it’s how Hajime Miura is going to answer  the question: “what can he do next?” And, right out of the gate, Hajime starts  his routine by launching two unstrung yo-yos   into the air to begin a series of soloham  tricks. So far, this is not necessarily unusual;   historically, and especially as of recent years,  soloham tricks have made their way into high-level   4A routines as a way for competitors to add  variety to their repertoire of moves. But as the performance goes on, Hajime maintains his soloham setup. And slowly, it begins to dawn on everyone in the room that for the duration of this routine,  Hajime Miura will only perform soloham. If you’re not familiar with the yo-yo scene  - and odds are that you’re not - it’s hard   to overstate how baffling this decision is.  While not technically the first of its kind,   watching a routine like this one is kind of  akin to sitting down to watch an NBA game,   only to witness one of the teams accurately and  exclusively shoot threes for the entire match. But after his performance ends, you have  an idea of what happens next. Not first, not second, not third. Not even fourth. There are two more things I want to tell you  about in this story before this video is over. First, I’m going to explain why this happened,  why Hajime placed so far from the money.   And then, I’m going to talk about  what all of this really means. There are a few good reasons why it was  unprecedented for Hajime to perform an   exclusively soloham routine. For one, the  technique is evidently difficult, which adds   an element of risk and variance to a form of  competition that relies heavily on consistency.   And while many members of the upper echelon  of 4A possess a degree of mastery that makes   performing soloham tricks far from impossible, its  presence in competition is quite uncommon. Of the 30 total minutes of 4A performance in the 2019  finals, only 4 minutes and 40 seconds consisted   of soloham tricks, with Hajime and Rei accounting  for the overwhelming majority of them. And beyond   difficulty, there are further caveats that come  with the style: soloham tricks cannot easily be   done in quick succession, due to the time it takes  to set up each trick; and certain trick elements,   such as throwing the yo-yo horizontally, are  simply infeasible when two yo-yos are in play. These constraints impact what are roughly  the three key features of a competitive   yo-yo performance: trick difficulty,  trick frequency, and trick variety. The way that yo-yo performances are scored is  through the usage of two tally clickers, one   in each hand. In one hand, you click for positive  points. And in the other hand, you click for negative   points. Afterwards, you subtract the negative  from the positive, and then normalize everyone’s   scores to get a final technical execution score.  This value is a key decider in where a competitor   ultimately places; the players with the highest  technical execution scores are very often the   players that win. And if we look at the final  scorecard for the 2019 4A finals, there is an   immediate discrepancy in the technical execution column: Hajime’s score is tied for last. While this outcome is pretty  incompatible with the average eye test,   ultimately, it turns out that these results track  based on the factors mentioned earlier. Hajime had a lower trick density than his competitors,  resulting in fewer opportunities to score points;   there were a few moments where he repeated  tricks, which does not award points; and finally,   there’s the rub, which is that the evaluation  of how many clicks a trick is worth, especially   when it comes to novel, lesser known tricks, is  a subjective task on the part of the judge. By all counts, Hajime’s final placement was fair  and justifiable. Under the standard criteria   of 4A yo-yo judging - criteria that Hajime is  undoubtedly deeply familiar with - there were no   flukes here. At the end of the day, if you want to  win the World Yo-Yo Contest, the rules matter. But even if we can understand why, by the book,  Hajime’s 4A performance was not a tournament   winner and in fact worthy of third-from-last  place, the heart tells a different story. It is trivially easy to find an endless  number of comments that revere Hajime’s   4A routine as the greatest yo-yo performance of  all-time. After the first-place announcement,   many were quick to declare that Hajime had been  robbed of back-to-back 4A world champion titles.   And for me, a casual observer of the yo-yoing  scene whose brain is hardwired to be obsessed   with highly kinetic, execution-heavy displays  of mastery, I just didn’t get it, either. But while, for many, Hajime’s 2019 4A  placement carries a heavy asterisk next to it,   his performance is also emblematic  of more than just a result. There’s a reason why yo-yo contests have a scoring  system for judging: in a yo-yo competition,   you need to figure out who’s the best at yo-yoing.  But what does that mean, “best at yo-yoing”? If you were to peer into the collective  consciousness of yo-yo players, you could pull out   hundreds and thousands of different conceptions  of what it means to be excellent at yo-yoing.   Some players’ ideas might be  well-structured and precise,   made up of clear sets of attributes, while other  players’ ideas might be fuzzy and abstract,   based on gut-feelings where you know it when you  see it. And if you were to take all of these ideas   and superimpose them onto one another,  you would end up with an amorphous,   Joe Baseball-like blob, or what I will be calling,   “cool shit”: the infinitely dimensional  venn-diagram of yo-yo beliefs and values,   hot in the center, and increasingly  disparate as you approach the edges. Truly defining cool shit is simply not possible  due its ever-changing, complex, and nuanced   nature. But when you’re hosting an event where  you’re trying to determine who can do the coolest   shit, you have to come up with something, in  fairness to those competing, and those who   oversee that competition. So, in order to address  this problem practically, we create sets of rules   that try their best to approximate a reasonable  definition of something that is ultimately   undefinable. If cool shit is a real-life orange,  sitting on a coffee table, then the rules are the   artistic renderings we create in order to try and  capture its image. None of them will be perfect.   Some of them will be distinct. And all of them  will embed and prioritize different values. This applies to almost every hobby and activity.  While organizations do hold skateboarding   competitions, for example, skateboarding culture  is extremely privy to the fact that cool shit in   skateboarding is deeply rules-resistant, and that  an olympic scoring system will never truly respect   the creativity of someone like Gou Miyagi,  or the sheer insanity of someone like Jaws.   And even in traditional sports, where the basic  parts of a game can be simply defined on paper,   like how basketball is a game with two  raised baskets on each end of a court,   with two teams who take turns trying to shoot a  ball into said baskets, the actual implementation   of that game is an approximation that is open to  interpretation. The NBA does not have a shot clock   that forces action every 24 seconds because shot  clocks are intrinsic to the essence of basketball;   the NBA has a shot clock because it’s their  best attempt at a way to express that the   league’s organizers, its fans, and its pros all  value a fast-pace in the game of basketball. None of this is to say that rules are inherently  good or bad, that the system is broken,   or that it needs to be changed. But, sometimes, we  forget that rules are merely a tool: a reflection   of cool shit, and not the other way around. So, when someone does something that is undeniably   essential, but the rules fail to see that, we are  reminded that cool shit fundamentally comes from   the soul. We are reminded that when it comes to doing cool shit, the rules don’t matter.
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Channel: RESPRiT
Views: 925,427
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Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)
Published: Sat Aug 13 2022
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