Asian Games: at 11, Japanese prodigy Yuki Kurihara wins esports gold

We don't talk about age to Yuki Kurihara. The young Japanese, an esports prodigy aged only 11, won a gold medal at the Asian Games on Saturday with panache, crushing opponents sometimes three times his age.

This bespectacled schoolboy, considered the youngest competitor of the Aichi-Nagoya Games, won 10-2 in the final of the Puyo Puyo Champions tournament. He was already the youngest athlete from host nation Japan in Asian Games history. Puyo Puyo Champions is a puzzle video game in which players must clear their screen of colorful blocks by lining them up and blasting them.

Unmoved throughout the competition, Kurihara reached the final after a series of dazzling performances. In the semi-final, he swept aside the Thai Tanarak Wongkitkun (28), a veteran compared to him, with a clear score of 10-1, thus ensuring at least a silver medal. In the final, he barely cracked a smile after his victory against South Korean Kang Dongshin, 24, even though he was trailing 1-0 at the start of the match.

School and play

Kurihara began playing Puyo Puyo in his first year of elementary school, before quickly entering competition and racking up tournament victories. He obtained his professional license last April and regularly dominates adults.

“It’s difficult to reconcile it with school and evening classes, but it’s really fun,” he confided before the Games. “We're on summer vacation, so I have a lot of time to train. I want to train intensely and develop new strengths,” he stressed.

There is no public register of the youngest medalists in the history of the Asian Games, contested for the first time in 1951. But the Indonesian Bunga Nyimas won bronze in street skateboarding at the age of 12 in Jakarta in 2018, and the Chinese Cui Chenxi was also crowned in street skateboarding at the age of 13, in 2023 in Hangzhou.