🇨🇳 Zhao Yicheng

Zhao Yicheng is a Chinese speed climber, reported born on 8 June 2009. Speed climbing is the most measurable discipline in the sport: a single standardised fifteen-metre route, identical at every venue in the world, with the same hold layout since 2007. That standardisation is what makes its world record so unforgiving — every hundredth of a second is directly comparable across decades and continents.

He built his reputation on the youth circuit before he was old enough to compete as a senior. Between 2023 and 2025 he collected three gold medals at the World Climbing Youth Championship, establishing himself as the outstanding junior speed climber of his generation.

His senior debut came at the 6th Asian Beach Games in Sanya, on home soil. In the men's speed preliminaries on 28 April 2026 he recorded 4.58 seconds, taking the world record from Sam Watson, the Paris 2024 Olympic bronze medallist, whose 4.64 had stood since the 2025 World Cup in Bali. The time also set a new Asian record. He converted the run into gold at the Games.

Less than two weeks later, on 10 May 2026, he improved again. In the semi-final at the World Climbing Series meeting in Wujiang he stopped the clock at 4.54 seconds, taking a further four hundredths off his own world record and confirming that the Sanya run had not been an outlier.

The two performances placed him at the front of a discipline that has been getting steadily faster since it entered the Olympic programme, and made him the youngest holder of the men's speed record in the sport's history.