Thirteen-year-old Chinese swimmer Yu Zidi won her third gold medal of the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games on September 23, cutting nearly four and a half seconds off the meet record in the women's 400-meter individual medley.
Yu led from the start and touched the wall in 4 minutes, 28.56 seconds, rewriting a games record that had stood since 2014. She finished 3.95 seconds ahead of teammate Ke Wenxi, who took silver, while Japan's Narita Mio claimed bronze.
The swim was more than a games record. It was the fourth-fastest time recorded anywhere in the world this year in the women's 400 individual medley.
Only Summer McIntosh Has Swum Faster This Year
Only Canadian world record holder Summer McIntosh has gone faster over the distance in 2026, underscoring how quickly Yu has closed the gap on the sport's best swimmers despite being years younger than most of her rivals.
The gold was Yu's third of the Nagoya Games and her third games record. She had already broken meet marks earlier in the competition while winning the 200-meter butterfly and the 200-meter individual medley, results that turned her into one of the most closely watched athletes at this year's Asian Games, a quadrennial multi-sport event that also features Taiwan and dozens of other national teams from across the region.
First Olympic Bid Came At Age 11
Yu's rise has been fast even by the standards of Chinese swimming. Born in Baoding, in China's northern Hebei province, she discovered the sport at age six after her father took her to a water park, where a coach spotted her potential and steered her into competitive training. She later moved to train at a swimming club in Hengshui.
In 2024, at age 11, Yu made her first bid to qualify for the Paris Olympics, finishing the 400 individual medley in 4 minutes, 40.97 seconds at China's National Championships, about two seconds short of the qualifying standard.
The breakthrough came in 2025, when Yu, then 12, took silver in the 200 individual medley at China's National Championships in 2 minutes, 10.63 seconds, to go with two golds in the 200 butterfly and 400 individual medley. The results were strong enough to qualify her for the World Swimming Championships despite being under the sport's usual minimum competition age of 14, and she went on to become the youngest swimmer ever to reach a final at a World Championships.
Youngest Medalist Since 1936 Olympic Bronze
At the 2025 World Championships, Yu finished fourth in both the 200 individual medley and the 200 butterfly, then helped China's 4x200-meter freestyle relay team win bronze. That relay medal made her, by multiple international accounts, the youngest swimmer to win a medal at a global championship since Denmark's Inge Sørensen took bronze in the 200-meter breaststroke at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Now A Contender For Los Angeles 2028
Yu's performance in Nagoya has drawn heavy coverage from international outlets including the BBC and the Associated Press, and some analysts now consider her a genuine medal contender for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, when she will be 15, an age at which most swimmers are only beginning to reach international competition.
