Fifty-Two Years, One Hundred Golds: China Has Never Lost an Asian Games Diving Title
Lian Junjie's gold on the men's 10-metre platform in Nagoya was China's 100th Asian Games diving title — and since the team's first Games in 1974, it has never once let the event's top prize slip away.
The number Chinese sports fans passed around on the holiday's first morning was 100 — the total of diving golds the country has now won at the Asian Games, completed when Lian Junjie took the men's 10-metre platform in Nagoya on September 30 with 501.25 points. The team closed the programme with ten golds, four silvers and two bronzes, and extended a record that borders on the absurd: since China first entered the Asian Games in Tehran in 1974, across 52 years and 14 editions, it has never lost a single Asian Games diving title.
The final gold nearly went the other way. Zhao Renjie, a 15-year-old, led the platform final by more than 30 points after three nearly flawless dives, then wobbled on his fourth and fifth and fell to fourth — leaving the Olympic champion Lian to close out the milestone under pressure. The Paper's account frames the moment as the team's whole story in miniature: the pipeline keeps producing teenagers good enough to lead a continental final, and the veterans are there to catch the milestone when the teenager's nerve gives.
The milestone landed in the middle of National Day, and state media folded it straight into the holiday's self-celebration: People's Daily saluted "the dream team" within hours, in a post liked more than 2,000 times by mid-morning. Diver Wang Zongyuan, who finished these Games with three golds, called the meet a completed "midterm" (中考) — the mid-cycle exam between Olympics that Chinese sport uses to take its measure. Diver Lu Wei, posting her farewell to the Games, wrote that she had been fortunate to witness the hundredth gold in person.
What the streak says about China is partly a matter of scale — a vast talent pipeline fed by provincial sports schools, and a federation with the depth to keep multiple generations of platform and springboard divers in competition simultaneously — but the more interesting part is the standard the streak sets internally. The team's nickname, the "dream team" (梦之队), carries an expectation that a sweep is the baseline and anything less is a slip; the conversation at these Games turned less on the ten golds than on the wobble that nearly cost the hundredth. The Paper framed the record as both reassurance and warning: the wins keep coming, but every final is now a test of whether the next generation can carry a 52-year inheritance.
The Asian Games close this week with China far ahead in the overall medal count, and the diving programme's hundred-gold ledger will stand as its most lopsided statistic. Japan's men pushed the platform final to the edge — a teenager led it into the closing rounds — but the record still reads the way it has since Tehran: China entered the event, and no one else has won it since.