After winning his second straight Olympic silver medal in PyeongChang, Japanese snowboarding star Ayumu Hirano had barely undone his bindings when he was asked about his plans for Tokyo.
“If I’m going to start aiming for [Tokyo 2020], I don’t have much time. I’ll need to train hard,” Hirano said at a post-event press conference, according to the Japan Times. “I need to organize my thoughts. It’s just a possibility at this point.”
Hirano, 20, plans to compete in skateboarding at the Japan Open on March 16, according to Reuters, and has said he’s aiming for a spot on the Japanese team when skateboarding makes its Olympic debut in 2020.
Known for his incredible amplitude and smooth board control on the halfpipe, Hirano’s ties to skateboarding link back to childhood: his father, Hidenori, owns a skate park in Hirano’s hometown of Murakami, located on the west coast of Japan. He could be one of the host nation’s most prominent stars in Tokyo if he makes the Olympic team.
He could also could face a familiar foe: Shaun White, who topped Hirano for gold in PyeongChang, has said he’s pondering a run at his first summer Olympics. White, 32, has won five X Games medals in skateboarding, but all of those were in vert, a non-Olympic discipline.
White said in February he was “cruising into skating,” in an interview with Olympic.org, while trying to plot out what he’ll need to do to qualify for Tokyo. “I’m best preparing for any outcome,” he said, and enjoying some time away from the snow. “I’m skating on Venice Beach, the sun is going down and I’ve stopped to get a taco,” she said. “I’m kicking it with my friends, instead of being in Colorado. It’s been great and I’m having fun. It’s a different type of skating [in Tokyo] to what I did previously, which was vert skating, the big ramps. Now I’m doing bowl skating which is rad, it’s so much fun.”
