Teenager Breaks Asian Games 100m Record as China's Sprint Stars Survive Scare
A record that had stood since 2018 fell in a matter of seconds on Friday night in Nagoya, and it was not broken by a Chinese sprinter.
Twenty-year-old Puripol Boonson of Thailand tore through the first semifinal of the men’s 100 metres in 9.91 seconds, erasing the Asian Games record of 9.92 set by China’s Su Bingtian at Jakarta 2018. The mark is a significant one: Su, the first Asian-born man to break the 10-second barrier and still the continental record holder at 9.83, is the benchmark by which every young sprinter in the region measures himself. Boonson, who has been tipped as a future global contender since his mid-teens, now owns a piece of that history.
China’s challenge will not go quietly. Zeng Keli, running in the same semifinal as Boonson, finished third in 10.24 and squeezed into the final as one of the fastest non-automatic qualifiers. Xie Zhenye, the veteran of the Chinese team and a former Asian champion over 200 metres, took second in his semifinal in 10.18 and advanced directly. Both will line up in a final that suddenly looks far more open than the host nation might have expected.
For Chinese athletics, the men’s sprint has been a story of incremental breakthroughs followed by long waits. Su Bingtian’s career turned the 100 metres from a curiosity into a national obsession, and his retirement from major international competition has left a gap that no single athlete has yet filled. Xie, at 32, remains the most reliable Chinese presence in the event, while Zeng represents the next generation. That both reached the final is reassuring; that neither posted a time under 10.10 is a reminder of how much work remains.
The women’s 100 metres offered a similar mix of promise and pressure. Chen Yujie ran 11.41 to finish fourth overall in her semifinal and book a place in Friday night’s final, with a Singaporean sprinter leading the qualifiers. Chen’s time is competitive but not dominant, and the final, scheduled for 21:20 Beijing time, will test whether she can find another gear under lights.
Elsewhere on a busy day at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, China continued to pile up medals. Song Jiayuan won the women’s shot put with a season’s best throw of 19.40 metres, and Zhang Linru took silver with 18.14, giving China a clean sweep of the top two places. In gymnastics, Tian Hao claimed gold on the men’s horizontal bar with a score of 14.700, holding off Japan’s Shinnosuke Oka and the Philippines’ Carlos Yulo. It was China’s 95th gold of the Games.
In the pool, Zhang Zhanshuo closed out an extraordinary meet with a seventh gold, winning the men’s 400 metres freestyle in 3:41.28, a new Games record. The 18-year-old said afterwards that he felt he still had more to give, a sentiment that will interest rivals ahead of the next World Championships. Zhang Yufei, meanwhile, defended her title in the women’s 50 metres butterfly in 25.41 and pushed back at online critics who suggested she was past her best.
Not every Chinese story on Friday ended in celebration. The women’s basketball team lost its semifinal to South Korea 85-85 — 80-85 — after missing all 13 of its three-point attempts, and will now play for bronze. Coach Gong Luming and players Zhang Ziyu and Luo Xinyu all struck a determined tone afterwards, promising to regroup. In tennis, world number one Jannik Sinner withdrew from the China Open in Beijing with a knee injury, disappointing local fans but removing a major obstacle for the rest of the field.
The sprint final, however, is the event that will define Friday night. Boonson’s record has raised the stakes, and China’s two finalists now carry the hopes of a home audience watching a teenager from Thailand rewrite the script.