Japan’s 11-year-old eSports prodigy Yuki Kurihara won gold at the Asian Games on Saturday, defeating a series of opponents up to three times his age in the Puyo Puyo Champions final.
The bespectacled primary school student, believed to be the youngest competitor at the Games in Aichi-Nagoya, won the final 10-2. He is the youngest athlete in host nation Japan’s Asian Games history. He later said he felt embarrassed by how dominant his run had been.
Puyo Puyo Champions is a puzzle game in which players try to clear their screen of coloured blobs by lining them up and popping them.
Kurihara looked unruffled throughout the competition, reaching the gold-medal match with a string of dominant performances. He beat Thailand’s Tanarak Wongkitkun, a relative veteran at 28, 10-1 in the semi-finals to guarantee at least a silver medal.
In the final, he came from 1-0 down to defeat South Korea’s 24-year-old Kang Dongshin, without showing much reaction throughout the match.
He started playing Puyo Puyo in his first year of primary school and soon began competing and winning in tournaments. He obtained his professional licence in April this year and regularly beats adult opponents.
There are no publicly available records of the youngest medallists in the history of the Asian Games, which were first held in 1951.
However, Indonesia’s Bunga Nyimas won bronze in women’s skateboarding at age 12 in Jakarta in 2018, and Cui Chenxi won gold in women’s street skateboarding at age 13 three years ago in Hangzhou.
