One year after Mao Asada said she planned to compete through the 2018 Olympics, the three-time world figure skating champion announced what she called a “sudden” retirement from competition Monday.
The 2010 Olympic silver medalist previously took a one-season break after winning her third world title in March 2014, one month after a disappointing sixth-place finish at the Sochi Winter Games.
Asada came back in 2015 but struggled, winning once in seven international starts the last two seasons and bottoming out with a 12th-place finish at the Japanese Championships in December.
“After I came back to competition, I wasn’t able to pull off the performance and achieve the result that I expected, and I started to worry more,” Asada, who reportedly dealt with a knee injury this season, wrote in a blog Monday, according to an Icenetwork translation.