MINE Yukiyo

General
2008 OLYMPIC VETERAN
At age 20 she was the youngest member of the Japanese team that won gold at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. After being part of the teams that won world championship titles in 2012 and 2014, she briefly retired from the sport and began coaching in 2015, before deciding to return to competitive softball after signing with the Toyota Red Terriers in 2016. She was recalled to the national team in late 2019. "After winning the [2008] Olympic Games and the world championships [in 2012 and 2014], I felt that I had achieved enough. It was good timing for me to take a break. But when I watched matches from the stands, I still felt a desire to be playing on the pitch, and I realised that I was not ready to finish my sporting career yet. In 2016 I received an offer to join the Toyota Red Terriers from former Coach Itsushi Fukuda, so I made a decision to come back to the sport." (sponichi.co.jp, 27 Dec 2019; nishinippon.co.jp, 14 Jan 2020; ninomiyasports.com, 10 Dec 2016; hochi.news, 13 Dec 2019; mainichi.jp, 31 Jan 2020; jiji.com, 20 Apr 2020)

At age 20 she was the youngest member of the Japanese team at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. At age 20 years and 208 days when Japan won gold in Beijing, she became the second youngest athlete from any nation to have won an Olympic gold medal in softball. (SportsDeskOnline, 01 Nov 2020)