Curling Team “Fortius” Commander Sayaka Yoshimura: “Challenging with All Her Might” for the Winter Olympics in Milan

Toward the World Final Qualifying Round for the Olympics

‘I feel refreshed today!’

Showing a refreshing smile at a ballet studio in the Maruyama area of Sapporo, Hokkaido, was Sayaka Yoshimura (33), the leader of the “Fortius” curling team that won the Japan preliminary round this September.

On this day, Yoshimura spent an hour doing ballet stretches, which she has been incorporating into her training menu since ’18. She repeated the stretches to the count of physical coach Shiori Akagawa, the representative of the “Maruyama Modern Ballet Company,” whom she has studied under since the beginning, tightening and loosening the stretches in sequence while being aware of the five body ranges of motion, muscles, and trunk over time, from the neck, shoulder area, back, arms, elbows, fingers, abdominals, pelvis, hip, thigh, knee joint, ankle, toes, and all the way down to the The body is also sweating,” he said.

It makes you sweat, and the sensation is somewhere between painful and pleasant.

While in their hometown of Sapporo, the entire team trains together once a week in ballet stretching, and Yoshimura also holds individual sessions in addition to this. Yoshimura also has a series of individual sessions in addition to the weekly ballet stretching sessions, which he likes because it allows him to check his own physical condition while recovering and refreshing.

Yoshimura started curling in the fourth grade of elementary school, but was also a member of the basketball team in junior high school and the volleyball team in high school, making him an all-around sportsman. He has repeated numerous stretches in his athletic career, including curling, but “I only knew the orthodox ones,” he says.

I’m a skip (a position in which one does not sweep), so during a match I inevitably get cold and my shoulders and back get rounded. When I do that (during the throwing motion), my hip joints don’t open the way I imagined. But after I started stretching with a specific awareness of where I wanted to stretch and where I wanted to move, I was able to get a sense of the whole body working together, and I feel the importance of taking care of myself off the ice.

Currently, there are more than 70 countries and regions that are members of the International Curling Federation, but among them, teams that incorporate ballet into their training are quite rare. That is why, when the team was not winning, there was not a little criticism that the training was pointless. The fact that the team has been able to continue without losing is probably due in large part to the team color of “Fortius.

When everyone decides to give something a try, we give it our all. We never said, ‘Let’s quit’ just because it didn’t lead to results.

Above all, Yoshimura and the other members of the team find ballet stretching “simply fun.

If you do what you can do and keep at it, you will see results. The range of motion would gradually widen, the legs would come up, and the movements that had been difficult to perform would come closer to the way we imagined them as we did them more and more often. That was a lot of fun.

In contrast to Yoshimura, who has had a soft body since childhood, his teammate Kaho Onodera, who is in the same grade as Yoshimura, is a third teammate. I’m hard, so even now I sometimes feel it hurts more than it feels good, but I’m happy that it’s gradually getting softer,” she says with a laugh.
The team’s name, “Fortius,” comes from a Latin word meaning “stronger. In order to become stronger, the team is willing to make steady progress.

In 2009, the contract with Hokkaido Bank, which had been the team’s main sponsor until then, was terminated, and “Fortius” was forced to start from scratch. In the same year, the team welcomed 19-year-old Mina Kobayashi (23), and in 2010, Yuna Kotani (27), who had a proven track record with another team, as new players, and Yumie Funayama (47), who had been a mainstay of the team since its formation, took a break from her competitive life and became a coach.

The team continued to search for new ways to strengthen the team, with Kazuyuki Shirai, head coach of the WBC in 2011, as mental coach, and the following year, Niklas Edin, a world-class curler who had won the Olympics and World Championships with the Swedish national team, was invited as special coach.

Naturally, there were risks involved in these multiple attempts, but the rewards were even greater. For example, Yoshimura revealed that ballet stretching helped stabilize the throwing motion known as “delivery.

He said, “By being able to move my body as I imagined, I was able to pursue the form I wanted to create, without using unnecessary force.”

The December 12 issue of “FRIDAY,” on sale November 27, details the true face of Yoshimura, who juggles work, child-rearing, and curling as the mother of a 2-year-old son.

From the December 12, 2025 issue of “FRIDAY