SOCHI, Russia — Yuzuru Hanyu was skating when the devastating earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan. He was 16, and he felt the ice rumbling and the ground thrusting and his legs wobbling. He ran from the rink in his skates, with no time even to put on skate guards.

There was only panic that day in March 2011, no imagining that in three years, Hanyu would become an Olympic champion (even after falling on a nervous night). No time for conceiving that he could become the first male figure skater from Japan to win a gold medal. No musing that he might share an Olympic podium, as he did Friday with the silver medalist Patrick Chan of Canada and the bronze medalist Denis Ten of Kazakhstan.

Hanyu’s hometown, Sendai, was near the epicenter of the earthquake. Pipes ruptured beneath his local rink, and the ice melted. The rink remained closed for several months. The walls cracked at his family’s home. He and his parents and his sister were left without electricity or drinking water. They spent three days in an emergency shelter in a gymnasium.

The tremors ceased, but Hanyu kept reliving the earthquake. He relied on visualizing his jumps as a training technique, but now all he saw in his mind was disaster. He had feared that he might die at 16, buried under a collapsed rink. Fatalism crept in.