Sheng Lihao, 21, Completes the Shooting Grand Slam With World Gold in Doha
China's 21-year-old air-rifle star won the world title in Doha, the one major medal he lacked, and in the same stroke secured a Chinese quota place for the Los Angeles Olympics four years after he first stood on an Olympic podium at sixteen.
The title went the way his matches go: quiet, precise, and out of everyone else's reach. Sheng Lihao won the men's 10-metre air rifle gold at the world championships in Doha on Tuesday — and with it the last major trophy his sport had left to offer. The list now reads Olympic champion, world champion, World Cup Final winner, Asian Games champion, Asian champion, in both individual and mixed-team events: what Chinese sports pages are calling 全满贯, the "full grand slam".
He is 21. He first stood on an Olympic podium at sixteen, taking silver in Tokyo, and took gold in Paris. The Doha title also carried a practical payoff: it secured China a quota place in the event for the Los Angeles Games in 2028 — which is why his name and that city's shared a trending tag on Tuesday night.
Chinese fans first adopted him for a detail the state-system presentation could never supply: his Weibo handle, 光靠干饭就 — roughly, "just by eating my rice." This week the handle wrote its own joke. "Some Weibo user just ate his way to an Olympic quota spot," one fan account marveled, sharing a celebration graphic crowned with gold CHAMPION lettering.
The persona matches the results. A fan summary that made the rounds — 枪响心静，环环稳健, "when the shot fires the heart stays still; ring after ring, steady" — doubles as a technical description of an event decided by millimeters at ten metres. Shooting is a discipline China's sports-school pipeline has mined for decades, and Sheng is its current exhibit: recruited young, drilled into implausible consistency, presented without drama. The drama, such as it is, lives in his comment section, under the lunch joke.
The grand slam usually takes a career; his took five years, from Tokyo to Doha. By Los Angeles he will be 23, and the only thing left to win is the same gold twice.