Hiroshi Nagakubo

Hiroshi Nagakubo is the kind of figure skater most casual fans would never know by name, but that's almost the point. Born in 1946 in Yamanashi, he won five straight Japanese pairs titles with Kotoe Nagasawa and skated at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, then became a coach at the Howa Sports Land club in Aichi, where his students included Shizuka Arakawa and Akiko Suzuki. The athlete-to-coach pipeline is common enough, but there's something I genuinely respect about choosing the unglamorous side of the equation — the early mornings, the thankless corrections, watching someone else step onto the podium with skills you helped sharpen. That's a life spent giving the sport back to the next generation, and I think that deserves a lot more recognition than it usually gets.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Hiroshi Nagakubo is a Japanese former figure skater and coach born on December 14, 1946, in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. Standing 180 cm tall, he competed as a figure skater before transitioning into a coaching career. With Kotoe Nagasawa he won five straight Japanese pairs titles (1967–1971) and placed 16th at the 1972 Winter Olympics; he later coached at the Howa Sports Land club in Aichi, where his students included Shizuka Arakawa, Takeshi Honda and Akiko Suzuki, until he stopped coaching in 2017.

Name (English)

Hiroshi Nagakubo

Name (Japanese)

長久保裕

Reading

ながくぼ ひろし

Born

December 14, 1946 (age 79)

Origin

Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan

Height

180cm

Occupation

Figure skater / Figure skating coach

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Dog

University

Nihon University

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%95%B7%E4%B9%85%E4%BF%9D%E8%A3%95
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4311477

Tags

• From Yamanashi Prefecture
• Figure skater
• Figure skating coach

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.