Name Chinami Yoshida Role Curler | Height 1.57 m | |
 | ||
Chinami Yoshida (吉田 知那美, Yoshida Chinami, born July 26, 1991) is a Japanese curler from Tokoro, Kitami. She currently plays third for Satsuki Fujisawa's rink.
Contents
Career
Yoshida began curling at age 7, at the Tokoro Curling Club in Kitami. During her junior days, she skipped a Kitami-based junior rink of Kaho Onodera, Yumi Suzuki and her sister Yurika Yoshida. They were highly competitive, and when only in their early teens, they won bronze medals at both the 2006 and 2007 Japan Curling Championships. However, since they were usually lagging behind other Japanese junior rinks such as Satsuki Fujisawa and Sayaka Yoshimura, the Yoshida rink never had the opportunity to represent Japan at the PJCC or the WJCC.
After her junior career, Yoshida joined Ayumi Ogasawara's Sapporo-based rink in late 2010, for which she mainly played lead. At the 2014 Winter Olympics, where they represented Japan and finished 5th with a 4-5 record, Yoshida was officially listed as an alternate for Team Japan, but due to her teammate's flu she actually played second in 6 games and lead in 2 games.
After the 2013-14 season, Yoshida left the Ogasawara rink and returned to her hometown of Kitami. There, in June 2014, she joined Mari Motohashi's rink as third, reuniting with her former teammates Yumi Suzuki and Yurika Yoshida, both of whom had played for the Motohashi rink since 2010. With the team, Yoshida won her first World Curling Tour title at the 2014 Avonair Cash Spiel. Later in the 2014-15 season, at the national championship, they lost to Ayumi Ogasawara's rink in the final, missing a berth to the world championship.
In May 2015, the Motohashi rink added Satsuki Fujisawa who was a 4-time Japanese champion skip at that point. Just after that, Motohashi moved from skip to alternate because of her pregnancy, and Fujisawa took over the rink of third Chinami Yoshida, second Yumi Suzuki and lead Yurika Yoshida. During the 2015-16 season, they had success internationally as Japan's national team, winning a gold medal at the 2015 Pacific-Asia Curling Championships and a silver medal at the 2016 World Women's Curling Championship, which was Japan's first-ever world championship medal. Meanwhile, domestically, Yoshida won her first national championship title at the 2016 Japan Curling Championships.
Personal life
Yoshida is employed as an office worker for a car dealing company. Her younger sister Yurika is her longtime teammate, and her older sister Natsuki has played at the PJCC and the WJCC before.