By Julian Linden, OCA Media
Nagoya, Japan, September 25, 2026: Korean teenager Hwang Seo-hyun beat a star-studded field of gymnasts to win gold in the women’s balance beam at the Asian Games and end a 40-year-drought in the event for her country on Friday.
While her older and more experienced rivals, which included Olympic medalists and world champions, came unstuck on the difficult apparatus, the 16-year-old Hwang produced a near flawless routine to wow the judges.
She earned a winning score of 14.700 points to become the first Korean champion on the beam since Seo Yeon-hee in 1986, edging Chinese teenager Qiu Qiyuan, who was gunning for her third gold at the Nagoya Rainbow Hall after winning the team event and uneven bars.
“It feels wonderful. The beam is an apparatus with a lot of variables. Other gymnasts made mistakes and I performed reasonably well myself,” Hwang said.
“On the beam, one mistake makes it hard to win a medal at all. So I thought, ‘I am going to get a medal here’.”
The diminutive Korean schoolgirl was the shortest competitor to qualify for the final but was rewarded for taking on the hardest program. While she didn’t score the highest number of points for her execution, she was elevated to first place because the degree of difficulty she took on was tougher.
“If your centre of gravity is higher up, I think you look less steady on it,” she said. “Mine is lower, so it is probably an advantage.”
Qiu made two small mistakes during her routine that cost her possibly getting to the top step on the podium but was gracious in defeat, saying the field was so strong that she just had to go for it and risk making errors.
“This beam final was packed with top gymnasts and the whole thing was fiercely competitive, so getting through it cleanly is already pretty good,” she said.
“There is a small regret because I did not perform the routine well enough. There were two fairly big wobbles up there, and they cost me some score.
“Everyone was very good. There were gymnasts who performed extremely cleanly and gymnasts who were going for difficulty. I thought they were all excellent.”
*World champion Aiko Sugihara lived up to her nickname of the "Twist Princess" with a dazzling routine to lead a Japanese one-two in the women’s floor exercise final.
Following on from her historic victory in the individual all-around event when she broke China’s unbeaten run dating back to 1974, Sugihara, 27, became the first Japanese female gymnast to claim two gold medals at the Asian Games.
Despite stepping over the line, she received the highest mark of 14.033 from the judges, pipping her 16-year-old team mate Misa Nishiyama, who won the silver.
“I was completely calm. I got into the zone, in a good way,” Sugihara said.
“There was a line-over, but I produced a good routine, and one of the reasons I could is that everyone’s support gave me strength. A home Games is the best.”
