Flying in Style

All eyes are on Ryōyū Kobayashi as he prepares to jump off the bath ledge. The Japanese ski-jumping sensation is standing against a vivid hand-painted mural of Mount Fuji on the wall of a seventy-year-old sentō, or public bathhouse, in west Tokyo. Kobayashi says he enjoys the occasional trip to these kinds of traditional establishments to refresh and relax, though today feels less of an indulgence with a dozen bystanders watching him being photographed.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” Kobayashi says of the attention. Which is just as well, because he’s become impossible to ignore. As well as being the official holder of the Japanese distance record and officially landing the third-longest jump ever, the twenty-eight-year-old athlete is a two-time overall World Cup champion and took gold and silver at the 2022 Beijing Olympics (in the men’s normal hill and large hill events respectively). But it’s what happened last April that dropped jaws everywhere. In Iceland, Kobayashi jumped 37.5 meters farther than anyone in history.

Kobayashi is a laid-back guy. He keeps his sentences short, even with those close to him, like members of his Team Roy club (Roy is what Kobayashi’s friends call him). He’s more likely to flash a smile than to speak at length.

“When I have nothing to do, I clean up around my house or hang out with friends,” he says. Clubs and wild nights out don’t interest him much, but visits to local museums have become common during his days off. Recently, he’s been enjoying the endless-summer fantasy paintings of Hiroshi Nagai and the polka-dot-centric work of Yayoi Kusama.

After the photo shoot in Tokyo wraps, Kobayashi talks with the owner of the public bath, snaps some photos with him and signs a white autograph board in the lobby. The whole time, he seems comfortable being the focus of attention.

“When I met Ryōyū about ten years ago, he was nothing like this,” Tomohiro Maruyama, the CEO of Team Roy, remarks. “He was reserved and often nervous. He’s changed completely in the last decade.”

A decade ago, Kobayashi was eighteen, growing up in Hachimantai in the northeast of Japan’s main island, and already an adept ski jumper. When he was three, his father built a practice hill in their backyard. “It was just a meter tall,” recalls Kobayashi. “They needed to move the snow to get the cars out. That’s how it kind of started.”

What it kind of started was a ski-jumping family. Kobayashi’s older brother and sister, Junshirō and Yūka, and his younger brother, Tatsunao, all became ski jumpers. “I did a lot of other sports, but they organized camps for ski jumping,” says Kobayashi, “so I knew it would get me out of school. But also, it would get me out of my hometown.”

It was at one of these camps, in 2014, that he encountered Japanese ski-jumping legend Noriaki Kasai, the only athlete to ever participate in eight Winter Olympics. That year, Kasai became both the oldest-ever ski-jumping Olympic ­medalist and winner of a World Cup event. He was forty-two. A year later, he asked Kobayashi to join his Tsuchiya Home Ski Team.

The team’s coach at the time, Janne Väätäinen, remembers his first impression of the rookie Kobayashi. “He was a good junior ski jumper, but there are many in Japan,” the Finnish former Olympian says. “With Ryōyū, there was something different. How smoothly he moved when jumping, or his in-run position [the pose a skier adopts as they travel before taking off]. I cannot explain it, but I was thinking, ‘This is something special.’”

At Kobayashi’s 2016 World Cup debut in Poland, he came in seventh. “Which is amazing,” says Väätäinen. “Good things happened that season, but the next one was really bad.”

→ Read the full story in rampstyle #35 "There Is No Substitute".