WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Episode 34 of Healin' Good Pretty Cure, "A Rival?! Tsubasa - The Wing Chiyu Needs," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
It's not often that the Pretty Cure franchise gives an athletic character a levelheaded personality, making Chiyu Sawaizumi a bit of an oddity. So when Episode 34 introduces her equal, Tsubasa Takami, in the high jump, it comes as a surprise that such a calm character would find herself lit by the fires of competition. Unfortunately, the long-term implications of this newfound rivalry may end up devastating her, rather than helping her grow.
The episode opens at a track meet, where Chiyu just narrowly manages to beat out Tsubasa for the high jump win. Tsubasa congratulates Chiyu in a sportsmanlike manner, accepting her defeat with grace and using it to fuel her drive to get better throughout the rest of the episode. However, things take a turn when Tsubasa tells Chiyu that they'll meet again at Worlds, then walks off.
The comment bugs Chiyu. She discusses it with Tsubasa when they're interviewed by a sports magazine, revealing that she doesn't actually have any larger goals than competing through high school, simply enjoying the sport. Tsubasa, a much more typical Pretty Cure athletic-type, is completely dumbfounded that she was beaten by someone with such little competitive spirit just before she moves out of the country, and storms off.
This causes Chiyu to question her motivations for continuing to participate in the high jump. Given her previously established and relatively easily obtained goal of running her family's ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn), one would expect the moral of the story to be "it's okay to do something just because you enjoy it, with no larger goal in mind." Yet it's here the more problematic aspects of the episode make itself known -- despite being overtly told by the other characters that she's allowed to just enjoy herself, the show implicitly says "no, it's not okay -- having fun isn't enough" by making her desire to fulfill her role as Tsubasa's rival, a girl she barely knows, more powerful than her logic.
While the show tries to justify this by showing how each girl's success spurs the other to jump higher, it still reinforces a "go big or go home" lesson to kids when it comes to goals and dreams. The simple decision to try to appease and rebuild a brand new relationship by changing her goals will have huge consequences for Chiyu. Since she's now aiming to become a world-class athlete, Chiyu will need to devote much more time to the sport and can no longer afford not to practice during her free time. This could have terrible consequences for her as Cure Fontaine, exhausting her before battles even begin and severely weakening the team as a whole.
The thing that will take the biggest hit is her original goal of running the Ryokan Sawaizumi. If she's serious about trying to get to Worlds, she'll soon realize that training alone will take up most of her time and energy, much akin to a separate full-time job. Her concern will need to be with herself, rather than with others as the hospitality industry would demand. Couple this with her other goal of saving the world, and Chiyu's barely going to have any time to do anything else.
Simply put, by taking up Tsubasa's offer of a friendly rivalry, Chiyu is either going to have to choose between her goals or find herself in hospital from trying to do it all! Her two dreams simply cannot coexist peacefully, and sooner or later, she'll have to return to the very crossroads that brought her to this point: choosing between swimming in the sky or serving others here on Earth.
