Ten Titles and a Farewell: China's Golden Night at the Nagoya Asian Games
In one evening at the Nagoya Asian Games, China's women beat hosts Japan 3-0 for a record tenth volleyball crown, Zhang Zhanshuo added a 1,500m freestyle gold, the medley relay took a fourth straight title — and 32-year-old Wang Shun said goodbye to his fifth Games.
On Monday evening in Nagoya, China's women's volleyball team beat host nation Japan 3-0 — 25-19, 25-20, 25-23 — to win the Asian Games title for the tenth time, a milestone the Chinese web compressed overnight into a single trending phrase: "ten-crown queens" (十冠王). The final was a repeat, in score and in opponent, of the Hangzhou Games three years ago, which China also took 3-0 from Japan. The path there was less serene: in the semi-final China edged Thailand 3-2, avenging a straight-sets loss to the same side in last month's Asian Championship final, while Japan dispatched South Korea to reach the decider.
The celebration ran well past the sports pages. The final sat near the top of Baidu's search board all evening — "China wins the title! 3-0 sweep of Japan" drew a score in the millions, and a separate thread for watching the match alongside other fans climbed the same board — while a People's Daily victory poster was liked more than 6,000 times within hours. On Zhihu, the question of how to judge a tenth crown drew responses that treated the scoreline as a formality and the roster turnover as the real story.
The pool added its own chapter earlier in the day. Zhang Zhanshuo won the men's 1,500m freestyle in 14 minutes 42.42 seconds, his second individual gold of these Games, with team-mate Fei Liwei sixth. In the evening's last final, the men's 4×100m medley relay quartet of Xu Jiayu, Dong Zhihao, Xu Fang and Pan Zhanle touched in 3:27.89 to take the event at an Asian Games for the fourth consecutive edition — a fourth straight title, and a third gold apiece in Nagoya for Pan and Xu. Pan, whose 100m freestyle title was retained here by four-hundredths of a second, is part of a generation already rewriting the programme's record book; a 13-year-old, Yu Zidi, broke an Asian record here last week.
Then came the goodbye. Wang Shun, 32, in his fifth Asian Games, took bronze in the 400m individual medley in 4:14.59 — his second bronze of the week after the 200m medley — and said in the mixed zone what he had hinted at all year: "This was my last Asian Games." He thanked his coach and the grind of preparing a fifth time, and said he now expects China's young swimmers to keep pushing the marks upward. State media made the farewell its own item; the crowd, and the swimmers who train with him, treated it as the end of an era in Chinese medley swimming.
China has led the medal table since the opening day, when the delegation took eleven golds, and the count will keep moving through the closing week. The evening in Nagoya was less about the arithmetic than the relay of generations: a 32-year-old swimming his last final, a 20-something adding a second gold, and a volleyball side that has now beaten Japan in two consecutive Asian Games deciders. Zhang celebrated his with the small right-handed salute that has become his signature; it brought the house down.