The Olympic Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.
The year - 1998.
Japan's best hope for a gold medal
lay in the ski jump,
and the man to carry that burden
was 23-year-old Kazuyoshi Funaki.
It takes years of preparation to reach the final
of an Olympic ski jump event.
For decades, ski jumpers had been exploring
the most effective way to fly through the air.
Funaki thought he had the answer to that question.
So what was his secret?
To answer that question, we need to take a look
at the fascinating history of this event.
Ski jumping was the most popular spectator sport
at the 1952 Winter Olympic Games in Oslo, Norway.
A crowd of 143,000 people,
half the entire population of Oslo,
turned up to see local hero Arnfinn Bergmann
win gold for Norway.
Ski jumping is Norway's gift to the world.
The sport was first introduced
by a Norwegian soldier called Olaf Rye.
His party trick was jumping 9.5 metres on skis.
That was in 1809.
My hat. Oh.
In 1952, the sport had moved forward.
Bergmann's winning jump reached 68 metres long.
Bergmann makes his winning jump,
to give Norway her seventh gold medal in the Games.
Strength and technique had taken the sport
to another level.
All you have to do is slide,
glide and stay on your feet if you can.
In the '60s, subtle changes were made to the jumping style.
The body straighter, arms by the side.
This was considered the correct and proper way to ski jump.
A great stylist of the '70s was Yukio Kasaya,
the star of the 1972 Olympic Games in Sapporo.
Kasaya was the first Japanese to win Olympic gold.
Style is important in ski jumping
because your final score is
a mix of distance plus style points.
Five judges award marks out of 20.
They are looking for elegance and smoothness,
and a textbook "Telemark" landing.
A great jump is typically matched with excellent style,
but actual perfection was unheard of.
Judges always found fault - that's what they're there for.
Perhaps the most elegant
and successful ski jumper in history
was Finland's Matti Nykanen, the first ski jumper
to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games.
Nykanen lifted the sport to an art form.
No-one could get close to him.
His best jump at Calgary 1988 was nearly eight metres further
than anyone else.
One who tried to get close was Czech Jiri Malec.
Malec believed that spreading his skis into a "V" shape,
as you can see here,
helped him achieve that little bit of extra distance.
Not enough to catch Nykanen,
the perfect exponent of the parallel technique,
but enough to help Malec win an Olympic bronze medal.
Unfortunately, Malec's success was limited because judges
preferred the clean lines of the classical ski jumpers
and the new V technique was consistently marked down.
And then it got scientific -
a group of Japanese academics studied the physics
behind the ski jumping technique.
They crunched the numbers. They worked out the formulas.
Calculus, geometry, trigonometry,
and the result was clear -
the V shape was the way to go.
Ski jumpers could barely switch quickly enough.
By 1992 it was the only way to fly
and the judges had no choice
but to adopt the new shape
as the ideal ski jumping technique.
The 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan,
took the V technique to a new level.
The big Japanese favourite was Kazuyoshi Funaki,
coached and mentored by the legendary Kasaya.
Using the modern style,
Funaki had some of his mentor's elegance in the air.
Having won silver on the normal hill,
Funaki's hopes for gold rested on the large hill.
It was then he achieved something never done before
in the history of Olympic ski jumping.
Funaki made the perfect jump.
132.5 metres long.
That's nearly as far as the Great Pyramids of Giza!
All five judges gave Funaki's jump a perfect score,
20 out of 20.
Style, elegance, landing - they just couldn't find fault.
A perfect score like this has the same odds
as getting a bull's-eye blindfolded,
with both hands tied behind your back.
Steady skis - tick,
balance - tick,
body position - tick,
landing - tick.
The jump was enough to win Funaki gold
in front of his home fans in Japan.
His extraordinary jump that day remains the only perfect mark
in Olympic history.