NAGOYA, Japan: Japan’s 11-year-old esports prodigy Yuki Kurihara won Asian Games gold on Saturday in style after thrashing a series of opponents up to three times his age.
The bespectacled primary school student, believed to be the youngest competitor at the Games in Aichi-Nagoya, won the Puyo Puyo Champions final 10-2.
He is the host country Japan’s youngest athlete in Asian Games history.
Puyo Puyo Champions is a puzzle game in which players try to clear their screens of coloured blobs by lining them up and popping them.
Looking unruffled throughout, Kurihara waltzed into the gold-medal match with a series of dazzling displays.
He crushed Thailand’s Tanarak Wongkitkun — a relative veteran at 28 — 10-1 in the semi-finals to ensure at least a silver medal.
In the final, he barely raised a smile after beating South Korea’s 24-year-old Kang Dongshin, having gone down 1-0 early on.
Kurihara started playing Puyo Puyo in his first year of primary school and soon began competing in and winning tournaments.
He obtained his professional licence in April this year and regularly beats adults.
“It’s hard having to balance it with school and cram school, but it’s really fun,” he said ahead of the Games.
“It’s the summer holidays now so I have a lot of time to practise. I want to practise a lot and develop some new strengths.”
There are no publicly available records of the youngest medallists in the history of the Asian Games, which were first contested in 1951.
But Indonesia’s Bunga Nyimas won bronze in women’s skateboarding aged 12 in Jakarta in 2018.
Cui Chenxi, 13, won Games gold when she triumphed in the women’s street skateboarding event three years ago in Hangzhou.
