Kosi, Kazuhiro

Kazuhiro Kosi was born on December 23, 1964 in the village of Otaki , Nagano Prefecture . In his youth, he was actively involved in athletics, in particular, shot put, played at various competitions, but after some time he realized that he could not achieve any significant results here, so he decided to try himself in sledding sports. Back in 1991, he tried to break into the Japanese national bobsled team for the Winter Olympic Games in Albertville , but failed. Later he became interested in a skeleton, new to Japan, and, having tried it, he soon began to perform quite well. Already in 1993, he made his debut at the adult world championships in the French La Planis, finishing twenty-ninth there, at the end of the same year for the first time participated in the races of the adult World Cup, showing the twenty-third time on the German Winterberg circuit.

In the 1990s, Kosi performed in a skeleton with alternating success, gradually becoming better and better. So, in 1995, at the January stage of the World Cup in the Austrian Eagles, he first hit the top ten, and in 1999 at the home stage in Nagano he won a gold medal, becoming the first Japanese winner of the World Cup. Two years later, he repeated this achievement, replenishing the medal collection with another gold award, while in the seasons 1997/98 and 2000/01 he seriously fought for the trophy, however, he always did not reach the first position a little, being in second place general classification ^[1] . Thanks to a series of successful performances, he was awarded the right to defend the country's honor at the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City , where he subsequently took eighth place.

He spent the 2002/03 season at the same high level, placing himself on the third line in the world ranking of the strongest skeleton athletes, while at the world championship in Nagano he was not enough for a medal. At the 2005 World Cup in Canada, Calgary closed the top ten in the men's singles and achieved the same result in team competitions. Having knocked out as a national team leader, went to compete at the 2006 Olympics in Turin , passed qualifications without problems and planned to compete for medals here, but in the end he came to the finish line only eleventh. Kosi continued to participate in major international starts, although over time his results declined, for example, at the 2007 world championship in St. Moritz, Switzerland, he could only reach the twenty-fourth position, a year later he was sixteenth at the World Championships in German Altenberg. The athlete began to hit the top ten of the World Cup extremely rarely, the last time it happened in February 2009 at the stage in American Park City, when he arrived ninth. A little later at the World Championships in Lake Placid, he showed the fifteenth result.

The last major international start for Kazuhiro Kosi was the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver (at that time he was already 45 years old), where he performed extremely unsuccessfully, taking the twentieth place in the men's standings. Soon after this failure, he decided to end his career as a professional athlete, although he continued to practice the skeleton “for the sake of improving health” and took part in the races of national championships. Over the course of his career, Kosi received the title of champion of Japan seven times, participated in thirteen world championships, visited seventy stages of the World Cup, and therefore is considered to be one of the most famous Japanese skeletonists. Having finished acting as an athlete, he took the post of head coach of his country's skeleton team ^[2] .

• Kazuhiro Kosi (German) (English) - page on the FIBT website

• Kazuhiro Kosi - Olympic statistics at Sports-Reference.com