Beijing – China’s Yu Zidi made history last year at age 12 when she became the youngest-ever medalist at the swimming world championships. Now a teenager, she is dominating at the Asian Games and has Olympic glory in her sights.
The 13-year-old school girl with a pixie hair cut stunned the sporting world last year with a series of eye-popping times.
At the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, she helped China reach the 4x200-meter women’s freestyle relay final.
She did not swim in the final, but China finished third, earning Yu a historic bronze for swimming in the heats.
Yu just missed out on medals in the 200 and 400 individual medley events and the 200 butterfly, coming in fourth in all three races.
In November at China’s National Games, having just turned 13, she clocked a blistering 2 minutes, 7.41 seconds in the women’s 200 medley for what was then an Asian record.
Now she is cleaning up at the Asian Games, winning gold in all three individual events she entered.
She won the 200 butterfly and 200 individual medley, then completed the hat trick with a victory in the 400 IM on Wednesday.
All three victories were in Games-record times.
While training with the China team in Beijing before the Games, she told local media she was “excited” for her Asian Games debut.
“Train well, don’t slack off. Demonstrate the level of your training and work hard to break past yourself,” she said, according to state news agency Xinhua.
A coach, Ha Sinan, once described Yu with a Chinese saying that translates as “a newborn calf fearless of tigers.”
But the teenager has spoken of struggling to deal with the heavy load placed on her.
Yu grew up in the city of Baoding, about 150 kilometers south of Beijing.
She was discovered by a swimming coach while at a water park at age 6 and has since juggled schoolwork with training.
“Being in class all day and still having to train was really tiring,” she said in January.
“Sometimes I was so tired I could fall asleep even while eating,” she said at an event celebrating Hebei province’s National Games wins.
Yu said she “never considered quitting” and always dreamed of being a national champion.
But during the tuneup to last year’s National Games she said the pressure of wanting to win the 400 medley nearly became too much.
“It was like a big stone that weighed on me and made it hard to breathe,” she said.
Yu eventually told her coach she wanted to do anything other than train.
Her coach told her to persevere and “believe in yourself,” she said.
Yu went on to win four medals at the National Games.
Some in the swimming world have questioned the mental and physical impact of high-level training and competing on Yu at such a young age.
Under World Aquatics rules, the minimum age for international championships is 14 but exceptions can be made for younger swimmers if — like Yu — they are fast enough.
Yu is shaping up to be a major medal threat at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, but she said she still has room to improve before then.
“I gained a lot from these Asian Games but there were also some regrets,” she said after the race on Sunday.
“I’ll go back and keep reviewing what I didn’t do well, and I hope I can do better next time.”
Yu’s time beat the previous 400 IM Asian Games record set by China’s Ye Shiwen in 2014 by almost 4.5 seconds.
It was the fourth-fastest time in the world this year, with world record-holder Summer McIntosh owning the top three.
Yu has dominated this week in Tokyo, where the swimming is being held, but she stood in wide-eyed amazement when a reporter suggested she had made it look easy.
“Definitely not,” she replied.
“It didn’t feel easy at all. It was quite challenging.”
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