Nagoya (Japan), Sep 24 (IANS) China claimed nine of the 14 rowing gold medals decided at the 2026 Asian Games on Thursday, winning all but one of the finals for a record one-day haul in the Continental extravaganza.
Heavy rain earlier this month squeezed five days of rowing into two, according to the organising committee. After Wednesday’s heats, all 14 gold medals were decided on Thursday at the Nagaragawa International Regatta Course in Gifu Prefecture.
Deng Zhiwei, making his Asian Games debut, got China off the mark in the men’s single sculls with a time of 6:38.98. Yi Xudi and Nie Yide followed in the men’s double sculls, holding off Uzbekistan by just 0.72 seconds to win in 6:09.77, reports Xinhua.
Yi, 33, who had only recently teamed up with Nie, acknowledged that the pair had had to work through differences in their rowing styles before securing a narrow victory.
“This gold is precious to me and to the team,” Yi said. “I’ve trained for 17 years. All that hard work is no longer just about winning gold. I’ve come to enjoy the training and racing itself.”
“That was a hard race in the last hundred [meters]. We weren’t stressed before that, even though there was a little bit of margin to our opponents. That’s all under control and in line with plan,” Yi added.
China’s women added five titles. Zhang Xinyu won the single sculls, Wang Sixuan and Shen Shuangmei took the double sculls, and Ren Wanning and Zhu Hongshan claimed the pair. Xu Yixi, Li Yan, Han Mengyao and Jiao Siyu won the quadruple sculls, while the crew featuring Zhang Shuxian took the four.
Zhang, 19, said she had felt both excited and under pressure when first asked to race the single sculls. She had been determined to give it her all and go for gold.
The men’s quadruple sculls crew added another gold before Li Chun, Li Zepeng, Shao Zhiqiang and Bian Shihao won the day’s final rowing title in the men’s four.
China’s only silver came in the men’s pair, where Yang Mengshuai and Cao Chuang finished behind Kazakhstan’s Vladislav Yakovlev and Ivan Chernukhin.
Elsewhere on the water, Chiu Hin Chun from Hong Kong, China struck gold in the men’s lightweight single sculls. Iran swept the two women’s lightweight sculls events, while Uzbekistan took the men’s lightweight double sculls title.
China had won 11 of the 14 rowing gold medals at the previous Hangzhou Asian Games in 2023.
–IANS
bsk/
