Takuro YAMADA

My main goal is to compete in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, but obviously I still have a lot of races before I can get there. Right now, I’m just experimenting with different tactics to get better times—racking up experience points, if you will.

There’ve been some changes in the events and the athlete classifications in advance of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, and in fact, this season, most of us will have to be retested for our classifications. The events available for the S9 class have changed as well, which has changed my options. And after a lot of thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be best for me to concentrate on the 50m freestyle. Right now, I’m just trying to prepare so I can perform to the best of my ability in the 50m.

Of course, it wasn’t a bad feeling to win a bronze medal. But I wasn’t satisfied with my time. For the longest time in my training I’d been working towards a 25-second time, but despite feeling good on the day of the event, I wasn’t able to perform as well I should have, like I wasn’t able to fully capture the “feel” of the race. There weren’t any big mistakes—it was just not being able to adjust for some minor things in the beginning, the wall touch at the end. You could argue that my time was still very good, given the circumstances and all that pressure, but I personally feel I could’ve done a little bit better.

In fact, in my strongest event, the 50m freestyle, I even set a personal best. But there were disappointments too, like not being able to set personal bests in any of my other events, or not being able to perform as well as I thought I could in the finals, given my times in the preliminaries. At the Rio Paralympics I really felt a discrepancy between my “feel” for my performance, and my actual performance.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t actually think it’s very difficult to be #1 in Japan, because there aren’t very many competitive para athletes in the first place. Being #1 in Japan and competing at the Paralympic level are two entirely different things. I get the impression that many of these athletes are not as aware as they should be of their own abilities relative to the world, and are okay with doing just the minimal amount of work. You get more exposure, no matter your level of performance. Or the media does a feature on you, but—it’s something that’s obvious to people that really understand the sport, when something’s not right. I understand the environment surrounding the Paralympics, and that there’s pressure for people to hype someone up just because they’ve been in the Paralympics, but anyone who watches us compete knows somewhere deep in their hearts when something is truly incredible—disability or not. And their impressions of the athletes connect directly to their impression of the Paralympics. And in the long run, I don’t necessarily think this is a good thing.

Casually, yes, but I do feel a bit of a generational gap in our attitudes. There are many athletes who are good enough to represent Japan, but would not be able to compete in the final rounds of the Paralympics. To be able to compete on the world level, athletes have to have a more comprehensive understanding of their own abilities, including differences of age, nationality, and more, and hold themselves to the highest of standards. I don’t feel it’s good to offer young athletes too many opportunities, without them doing the work that’s required for them.

That experience has been very important to me. Up until around middle school, I was seriously aiming for the Olympics. Even when I participated in the Paralympics for the first time in my first year of junior high, I thought it was a completely different world from the swimming that I did on a regular basis. It wasn’t until high school, and the people around me started performing at significantly higher levels, that I turned my focus to the Paralympics. Until then, I’d performed at levels higher than the able-bodied standard. Obviously, there’s much tougher competition in the world of able-bodied swimming, so training in that kind of environment was very stimulating and motivating for me. In Japan, there aren’t very many para athletes in any class, but on a world level, my class—with its relatively light disabilities—has many athletes, and the level of competition is high. These athletes don’t necessarily train differently, just because it’s a parasport. Instead, what I see is that they incorporate training principles from able-bodied swimming, and that the athletes who are best able to incorporate these principles end up being the best athletes.

No, not really. Now that the Paralympics are to be held in Tokyo, though, this is beginning to change, with a lot more universities open to accepting para athletes. But of course, able-bodied and swimmers with disabilities aren’t able to train in exactly the same way, and there are obvious differences in swimming ability. So the reality is that a lot of these things are just for the look of it—all training in the same pool—and without much substance.

Yes. I’d already decided that I would commit to the same training as the rest of the team. I’m probably the first athlete in the history of para swimming that joined an actual team in a university and did all the training the other team members did. Looking back on it now, I see there were good sides and bad sides to this experience, but it was definitely something I had to experience for myself. All in all, I think I made the right decision to do what I did.

The good side of this experience was getting to be among these athletes who were all facing such tough competition, and trying to compete at the world level. It taught me a lot of things, including how to handle the mental elements of the sport. There were also just so many hours of practice, and this practice would be with swimmers who were all good enough to have competed in the final rounds of the All-Japan High School Tournament. And this was practice for them to be even better. I was doing all the same things as they were doing, but with one less arm, and so even compared with foreign para swimmers, I think what I was doing was fairly intense.
The bad side of this was also the sheer amount of practice. Put simply, I was overtrained. I kept having aches and pains and injuring myself, which made it very difficult to achieve any personal bests, even though I was training so much. I tried all kinds of things in the four years I spent on this team, but my conclusion, looking back on it now, is that it was a bit different from what I’d imagined it would be. I did get a bit faster, since I did achieve a personal best at the London Paralympics, but still. All in all, though, I think this was a good experience for me. It allowed me to experience all these things first-hand, and had an impact on the way I trained after I graduated university.

Just the fact that I only have one arm means I’m unbalanced. With swimming, you have the added factor of water—how to decrease resistance as much as possible in this special environment, while also propelling yourself forward with a different form of resistance. In the end, no one knows exactly what they need to do to be able to swim the fastest. We’re all looking for the answers. This is part of the reason why I wanted to go through the same training, the same hours of practice as my able-bodied peers—because I wanted to figure this out.

I started working with my personal coach, Naoki Takashiro, in the fall of 2015. He was originally the coach for Ryo Tateishi, bronze medalist for the 200m breast stroke in the London Olympics. I’ve personally always thought that athletes with relatively light disabilities, like me, don’t necessarily need a coach that specializes in athletes with disabilities. I was looking specifically for a coach that had the experience and knowledge to help able-bodied swimmers beat their competition, and so I decided to work with coach Takashiro. He’d never coached a para athlete before, but neither of us were anxious about working together, and just as I’d expected, there weren’t any issues at all. I think as long as para athletes are clear about what kind of image they have for their own swimming, and are able to convey this to the coach, there shouldn’t be any issues. In fact, I feel the best method for improving myself is to come up with ways to integrate these images I have with the knowledge and data the coach provides for me. I feel in that sense that my training right now is very high-level, and I’m happy with it.

It all comes down to getting my times down for the start of the one race I’ll be competing in Tokyo. I think if I can just make that better, my times will get better too.
Two years seem like it goes by so fast in hindsight, but actually feels quite long [laughs]. I train in all kinds of ways, but they all do something to improve some aspect of my 50m race. As I train, I just want to learn to sense the little changes inside of myself, so I can get my “feel” and my physical condition to suit each of the races I’ll be competing in.