Sheng Lihao Wins Two Shooting Golds in a Day, Breaking His Own Asian Record, at the Nagoya Asian Games
China's 21-year-old rifle champion defended his Asian Games title with a 254.2 final that broke the Asian record he already held, hours after a world-record team gold in Nagoya — the centrepiece of a Chinese squad that took eleven golds on the first day of competition alone.
The margin was the story's quietest detail. Sheng Lihao, twenty-one, shot 254.2 in the men's 10m air rifle final at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games on September 21, defending the title he won in Hangzhou three years ago and breaking the Asian record — which he also already held. A few hours earlier, shooting alongside Zhang Changhong and Ma Sihan, he had taken the team event with a world record. Two golds in one morning completed what the trending phrase called a full sweep (全满贯): Olympic, world and Asian Games titles in the same event, all before his twenty-second birthday.
The day's sequence read like a metronome. In morning qualification Sheng topped the field with 635.4, edging past the Asian and Games record of 634.5 he set at the Hangzhou Asian Games; the team final then delivered the world record, as CCTV's sports desk relayed within the hour; the individual final closed it out. Ma Sihan, the third member of the team, finished fifth in the individual event. Air rifle finals are decided by tenths of a point — a 10.6 on the last shot held Sheng's lead, as one widely shared post noted — which makes his habit of beating his own marks less like dominance than like a personal chronometer running ahead of the field.
China's sports internet, characteristically, spent the afternoon on his hometown. Fans arguing over whether the champion belongs to Kunshan or to Suzhou were corrected by the Suzhou government's own Weibo account: he is from Donglai village, Zhangjiagang — as the account putting the scoreboards in order recorded, the same answer Sheng gave on his Paris Olympics profile, where under birthplace he wrote simply "I'm from Donglai" (我是东莱的). The exchange is a small specimen of a durable Chinese custom: cities compete to claim champions, and the champion's own registration, or hukou, is the tiebreaker. His nickname travels more smoothly than his paperwork — fans call him "Rice-Eating Brother" (干饭哥), after the handle that says he gets by 光靠干饭就, "just by eating meals."
The double gold sat inside a larger Chinese surge at Nagoya: eleven golds on the opening day of competition alone, from the pool — where Pan Zhanle held off his own record in the 100m freestyle, as we covered — to the shooting range, a sweep the Baidu hot board was tracking by lunchtime. Shooting has long been China's quiet medal machine, and the individual final's 254.2 explains the confidence: the number the field must now chase belongs to a twenty-one-year-old who keeps moving it, and who will carry it to the Los Angeles world stage in two years' time.