A year without overseas competitions amid the coronavirus pandemic has been a challenge for speed skating star Miho Takagi, and one that provided her a different perspective on sports.
The 26-year-old Hokkaido native secured an impressive sweep of all five distances at December's national championships and she was thankful she could continue to gear up toward next year's Winter Games in Beijing despite the adversity the world is facing.
"It was fortunate I could still compete in domestic competitions. Because I couldn't go overseas, it was a year that made me think on many fronts about how to handle the situation," Takagi told Kyodo News in an interview.
"I was able to take away a lot of positives."
Takagi, who made her Olympic debut at the age of 15 in the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, won three medals in 2018 in Pyeongchang -- team pursuit gold, silver in the 1,500 meters and bronze over 1,000.
Her five-event nationals sweep last year at Meiji Hokkaido Tokachi Oval has more than showed where she stands domestically, topping the podium across the 500, 1,000, 1,500, 3,000 and 5,000 events in a season in which she renewed numerous national records.
"It was great I was able to improve my records in the end, but it's dangerous to look at them without considering there was no jet lag or long travel," she said. "It's possible I may feel more distressed by those things next season."
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Still, the all-rounder acknowledged she was able to stay on top of her game under the most unexpected of circumstances.
"Your emotion naturally gets heightened with that thrill of interacting with (strong overseas) skaters around. I tried hard this year to get my mindset right all on my own," she said. "And there was no dip in motivation."
Takagi failed to qualify for the 2014 Sochi Games, but more than made up for that disappointment four years later.
And she has high hopes for one individual gold medal or maybe even two next year in Beijing, especially in the 1,000 and 1,500, where she expects the same high-intensity competition she has experienced before.
"I was desperate to go up the ladder around the time of Pyeongchang. I was finally on the podium (at an international meet) a year before the games and was a regular during the Olympic season," she recalls. "I was trying to see how far I could go. I was tense all the time."
But she also believes there will be a difference this time.
"I feel the sense of 'doing battle' (in Beijing) will be bigger than in Pyeongchang. I felt you had to battle against everything at the Olympics -- I'll have to do so against myself and the coronavirus as well as that unique atmosphere and pressure."
The first few months of the pandemic had her questioning whether to keep training amid all the difficulties, but Takagi over the course of a year has come to see her vocation as more than just participating in nerve-wracking competition.
"I've been facing my inner conflict, and reached a point where I can feel it's fun to compete," she said. "At this moment, I'm putting more emphasis on how I want to battle out there, more than on the results themselves."
