Koji Murofushi has made his name as one of the great hammer throwers of recent history. But Japan's former Olympic and world champion is now widening his circle of influence as he sets about his new duties as Sports Director of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

At 39, Murofushi is still an athlete - earlier this year he won is 20th consecutive national title - but he is gradually altering his outlook from the pursuit of individual excellence to the quest for communal improvements as he begins to set out his own vision of what an Olympic legacy should look like.

This week, at the Sport Event Management and Organisation Seminar hosted here in Tokyo by the Tsukuba International Academy for Sport Studies (TIAS) with the assistance of the The International Academy of Sport Science and Technology (AISTS) Mastering Sport group, Murofushi has thrown out some suitably big ideas.

He wants to engage not just the younger generation in Olympic legacy, but the older one too. He wants to try and link the Olympics so that they bring benefit to communities shattered by natural disaster, as so many in Japan were three years ago when a tsunami devastated its east coast.

Koji Murofushi shows off the bronze medal he won in the hammer at the London 2012 Games. As Sports Director of Tokyo 2020 he now has wider Olympic ambitions
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He wants Japan to open itself to the world again, as it did in hosting the 1964 Games in Tokyo. And he wants Japan to reach out to the world in the form of its Sport for Tomorrow programme, introducing coaching and anti-doping knowledge to 100 developing countries.

For a man who has spent so much of his life spinning round in circles, Murofushi demonstrates an awesomely steady gaze.

But then, as he also described to the seminar, he has had many years of practising that most awkward of tasks - looking clearly at oneself, something he was obliged to do from a very young age under the coaching of his father, Shigenobu, who held the Japanese hammer throw record for 23 years until it was broken by his son..

"I was lucky enough as a boy to have father who was also my coach and mentor," Murofushi recalled.

"This was many years ago, long before smart phones or anything of that nature. At every practice, every event, right from when I was very young, my dad would be there and he would be holding his old-style cine-camera, filming everything I did.

"I am sure that my dad was proud of me and what I was doing, like any dad in the world, but he wasn't filming to show off to my aunties at Christmas. He was filming so I could take a long hard look at myself.

"Those reels of cine films would be sent off to the lab for processing, and back they would come, and we spent hours - sometimes three or four hours - going over what I had done, had I got my timing and my rhythm right, where was I going to fall apart?

"It is one of hardest things to look at yourself and understand what is working out for you and what is not working. I'm convinced that is the No.1 building block of having a proper perspective. It all started with me as a boy."


Koji Murofushi shows the technique painstakingly developed under the watchful eye of his father, and his cine-camera, at last year's IAAF World Championships in Moscow
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Murofushi, currently an associate professor in sports science at Chukyo University in Nagoya, went on: "It's about looking. It's about thinking. You look at yourself and think how you can do better.

"Unless you can help a young person do that you can forget helping them to a better perspective. You need to be able to help some of them forward to correct what was wrong and to build a new level. For me the new level was on an athletic field. But the same thing applies to whatever you are grappling with or trying to do, whether it's baking a cake, learning averages or building a wall.

"I certainly didn't always get it right. Several times I thought I didn't need that help and perspective any more, that I was totally on top of my own process. Every time was wrong.

"I teach a class at university. A lot of my students are athletes. I know they are all ambitious, and I know that one of the reasons for turning up to my class is that many of are dreaming of winning a gold medal.

Jacques Rogge, the then IOC President, reveals Tokyo as the hosts for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Murofushi will be at the heart of Japan's efforts to deliver effectively ©Getty Images

"One day I decided to challenge them. I told them, 'We all know you are crazy for gold. Gold is my goal too. But I want you to talk about something else. I want you to stand up and tell the class what you really want to achieve, what really matters to you.'

"They looked a bit puzzled, so I gave them an example from my own life.

"When I won my last medal, at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu, sure, my goal was gold. But my cause, my deep motivation, was something different. I had been torn about and moved by the tragedy of earthquake. I spent time with these people and thing I knew they wanted to have most was hope.

"I wanted to win gold so I could take that medal and offer it to the people of Kobe. I wanted to give them hope.

"The students understood this - and soon their stories flooded out. It is not easy for young people to talk about such serious things when they are with each other.

"But one girl stood up and told us how her parents were finding it hard in coming to terms with the idea of her going off to study. They had very little money. University isn't cheap, and they didn't have any personal experience of education. l it was just a huge headache and worry for them.

"So her cause, her deep motivation, was about showing her parents that this path would work out of them and that ultimately she would be able to help them financially.

"When I hear someone tell their story in that kind of way I hold my thumbs up and say, 'That's a proper perspective.'

"And when you have perspective, that is what you can turn into performance.

"Kids are growing up all around the world thinking they will be better - richer, maybe faster, more intelligent, more responsible - than their parents.

"My father was a hammer thrower and of course my big idea was to be able to throw further than him. When I could do that, surely I would be better than him.

"But over time I came to realise his real achievement was his generosity and skill in making me a more successful athlete than him.

"So I will only be able to say I am better than my dad when I have coached someone who can be better than me."

Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress, adopts a boxing pose circa 1950. He would later speak inspiringly of sport's potential power to inspire and heal
©Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Murofushi then made reference to the quote about sport memorably offered by the late Nelson Mandela: "Sport has the power to change the world...it has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair."