Daisuke Takahashi

Daisuke Takahashi (高橋 大輔) is a retired Japanese figure skater (men's singles and ice dance) and ice show producer.

Takahashi had a successful junior career, winning the 2002 World Junior Championships in his first and only appearance at that competition.

Takahashi is the first Japanese man to have won the title.

For the 2002–03 season, Takahashi turned senior.

He struggled with consistency during the first few years of his senior career.

In 2004, he moved to Osaka to attend university – the university built a rink for him and other elite skaters.

Takahashi won a bronze medal at the 2005 Four Continents Championships and went on to the 2005 World Championships as the second-ranked of the two Japanese men on the World team, after Takeshi Honda.

In the 2005–06 season, Nobunari Oda emerged as a challenger for the Olympic spot.

Oda and Takahashi both had very good Grand Prix seasons.

At the 2005–06 Japanese Championships, Oda was declared the winner and, thus, seemed to have qualified for the one Olympic slot, but his gold medal was quickly taken back when an error was found in the way scores were calculated in the computer system at the event; Takahashi was awarded the gold.

The Japanese Skating Federation split the international assignments, giving Takahashi the Olympic berth and Oda a place at the World Championship.

Takahashi represented Japan at the 2006 Winter Olympics, 2010 Winter Olympics, and 2014 Winter Olympics.

However, when Honda was forced to withdraw due to injury, it fell on Takahashi to qualify spots for Japan at the 2006 Winter Olympics.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics, Takahashi was in a good position after the short program but had a poor free skate and placed 8th overall.

In the 2006–07 competitive season, Takahashi won a silver medal at 2006 Skate Canada International, then gold at the 2006 NHK Trophy.

He qualified for the Grand Prix Final and won the silver medal, although he was ill.

He won the Japanese Championships, taking the national title for the second year in a row, and then went on to the Winter Universiade in Turin, Italy, which he won as well.

Takahashi placed third in the short program at the 2007 World Championships.

In free skating, he skated the performance of his life in his home country, placing first in that segment and ending up winning the silver medal, trailing Brian Joubert narrowly.

This was the first silver medal for Japan in the men's event at Worlds.

Following that season, the ISU ranked Takahashi first in the world.

However, over the summer, the ISU tweaked its scoring criteria.

Takahashi had been placed on top, just ahead of Brian Joubert, partly due to Takahashi's victory at the Winter Universiade, a competition for which Brian Joubert was not eligible, as Joubert was not a university student.

The ISU determined that the results of the Winter Universiade could not be used to calculate world ranking, and Takahashi's ranking fell from first to second place.

In the 2007–08 season, he won gold at both his Grand Prix events and then silver at the Grand Prix Final behind Stéphane Lambiel.

As a singles skater, he is the 2010 Olympic bronze medalist, the 2010 World champion, the 2012–13 Grand Prix Final champion, a two-time (2008, 2011) Four Continents champion, and a five-time (2006-2008, 2010, 2012) Japanese national champion.

His bronze medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics was the first Olympic medal for Japan in the men's singles event.

He was also the first Asian man to win a World title at the 2010 World Championships.

At the 2012–13 Grand Prix Final, Takahashi made history again as the first Japanese man to win a gold medal in the event, an addition to his previous accomplishment of being the first Japanese man to medal at the event in 2005.

Takahashi retired on October 14, 2014, but returned to competitive skating on July 1, 2018.

Takahashi placed 15th, qualifying only one spot for the Japanese men.

After two seasons competing domestically in Japan, Takahashi began a career in ice dance partnered with Kana Muramoto beginning in the 2020–21 season.

With Muramoto he is the 2022 Four Continents silver medalist, the 2022-23 Japanese national champion and the 2022 Denis Ten Memorial Challenge champion.

Takahashi is the first and at present only competitor to have earned medals at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in two different disciplines.

He is not only a pioneer in the field of competitive skating in Japan, but has also been a key individual in innovating the Japanese ice show market by headlining Hyoen, a novel cross-genre show format (combining several genres, such as kabuki, with figure skating), which implements projection mapping and addresses underrepresented themes such as the portrayal of same-sex attraction, among others.

Since January 2023, he has taken on the role of producer/director and made his debut with Ice Explosion 2023.

In addition to performing in ice shows, he has also appeared as a dancer in Cheryl Burke's stage production Love on the Floor.

Born in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, Japan, Takahashi began figure skating when he was eight years old.

When a skating rink was built near his house, he went with his mother to watch the skaters at the rink and, afterward, enrolled in the figure skating club.

His mother intended for him to enroll in the ice hockey club, but he did not like the protective gear of ice hockey and enrolled instead in the figure skating club.