Skater Javier Fernández – two-time world champion, seven-time European champion, Olympic bronze medalist – is not just any athlete. His origins, attitude to the sport and an innate and unusual aptitude in a discipline with little tradition in Spain distinguish his story from that of other athletes while reflecting the challenges common to those at the top level. The documentary series Javier Fernández. Breaking the Ice (available on RTVE Play; an hour and a half version will be broadcast on Teledeporte this Friday), with more than 35 interviews and the testimony of the skater himself, covers his sporting and vital journey up to his retirement in 2019 at just 27 years old and over two decades of career lie behind him.
The first of the three episodes, produced by RTVE in collaboration with Factoría Henneo, tells the origins of Fernández, how he followed in his sister’s footsteps in skating as a child and how his family did everything possible for the two to train. This first part also looks at mental health in sport due to the anxiety crisis he endured in his early years of high level training. The second chapter looks at his early triumphs and the media pressure he endured at the Sochi Olympics. As Santi Aguado, one of the directors and screenwriters of the documentary, explains, one of the issues at stake is the relationship between gender and sport. “Ice skating is a very feminine sport and, despite being straight, he suffered from homophobia as a child because his friends played hockey at the rink and he skated.” His greatest achievements and eventual retirement are preserved for the third episode, a topic shared by other athletes who have been through this pivotal moment in their lives.
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For Aguado, there are several elements that set Javier Fernández apart from other top athletes. “He was always criticized for his laziness. I like that because the viewer can associate a lot with it. There’s a lot of talk about the performance culture and the level of ambition of the athletes and he was also very demanding on himself but in a different way with his pace. He claims to take things easy. Javier’s success also has a lot to do with his coaches being able to understand that there are athletes who do things differently. It makes him very humane that he himself talks about the fact that he was late, that he was sometimes too lazy to train, that he stayed up all night playing play and was tired the next day…”, says the director. It also highlights the skater’s different attitude compared to other athletes in the face of victory and defeat. “When he loses the medal in Sochi and finishes fourth, he’s surprised at how injured everyone is. And he thinks it’s “okay, if I haven’t won a medal, it’s the next one”. It’s an approach to life and sport, we’d say it’s simple, which makes it closer than other victory-obsessed athletes.”
Skater Javier Fernández at the premiere of the RTVE documentary series Play on February 23 in Madrid. Ricardo Rubio (European press)
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Amid the explosion of documentary series featuring athletes on digital platforms, RTVE Play, the free public television platform, has chosen a minority sport and a different character for its approach to the genre. “It seemed to us that it was the opposite of the almost commercial-like documentaries that are made on other platforms,” says Alberto Fernández, director of RTVE Play, in a phone conversation. “On the one hand it’s the story of an athlete who falls and gets back up, he’s a rather unlikely sports hero, a more artistic person and with a less conventional path of a top athlete. And secondly, he played with a winter sport in Spain, where there is no tradition and he has to build a professional career from scratch, and still manages to become a world reference. It was a way to summarize our positioning as a platform in front of this content,” he summarizes.
Of the testimonies contained in the documentary, Santi Aguado highlights that of the Japanese skater Yuzuru Hanyū, considered one of the best skaters in history. “I would have liked to have explored more of the rivalry/friendship that he and Javier had. They trained together like Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal trained together. His testimony is very interesting because unlike Javier, who was very demanding on himself, he had a very bad time when he lost, with a very different attitude towards skating. Somehow they came back and enriched themselves. We would have liked to go deeper, but in Japan they were in the middle of a pandemic and the hours we had with Yuzuru were limited,” says the director.
Javier Fernández, in the performance that earned him his fourth consecutive European title DAVID W. CERNY (Portal)
In the documentary, Javier Fernández recalls how, in the early years of professional skating, he suffered at home in bed every night with anxiety that prevented him from breathing and even ended up in the hospital with him. Alberto Fernández highlights how the skater speaks about mental health and anxiety. “Many athletes do not have the emotional formation to face certain situations and adapt to the circumstances,” recalls the director of RTVE Play. Both Aguado and Fernández emphasize the importance of family in the skater’s journey. “It’s the story of a humble family who will do whatever it takes for their son to try something that is very unlikely to succeed. This series tells the sport from the point of view of ordinary people,” says Alberto Fernández.
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