The youngest medalist ever... Kang Dong-shin, the Korean national team member, also passed.

(Nagoya = Yonhap News) Reporter Kyung-yoon Kim = The youngest player on the Japanese national team, Yuki Kurihara (11), who is in the 5th grade of elementary school, won all 4 games of e-sports 'Puyo Puyo' at the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games and passed the preliminary round as first place in Group A of the group stage.

Kurihara, born on June 18, 2015, defeated Carl Owen Gonzalvo (Philippines) 3-0, Aleksandr Pivovarov (Kazakhstan) 3-0, Korean national team member Kang Dong-shin 3-1, and Yu Wing-lim (Hong Kong) 3-0 in the Puyo Puyo preliminaries held at the Sky Expo in Aichi Prefecture, Japan on the 24th.

The medal match will be held on the 26th, and if Kurihara wins a medal, she will become the youngest medalist in Asian Games history, beating Indonesia's Nyimas Bunga Cinta (12 years old at the time), who won a bronze medal in the women's street skateboarding at the 2018 Jakarta-Palembang Games.

Kurihara reached the top of the international competition when she was in the third grade of elementary school, and won the Puyo Puyo Grand Prix Final this year.

My favorite subject is social studies, my favorite food is eel, and my future dream is to become a train engineer.

In an interview with Nikkan Sports ahead of this tournament, he was asked, "What would you like to buy if you win this tournament and receive the prize money?" and said, "Just something like jewelry."

Esports was adopted as an official event in the Asian Games starting from the 2022 Hangzhou Games, and Puyo Puyo is a game where you stack blocks like Tetris and connect four or more jelly characters of the same color to pop them.

The more characters you create of the same color, the more characters you can send to attack your opponent. Kurihara recorded a record of eliminating up to 19 characters at once.

Kang Dong-shin lost to Kurihara, but won the remaining three games and passed the preliminary round.