North Korea’s Ri Song-gum won the women’s 49kg weightlifting title at the 2026 Asian Games in Nagoya after setting world records in all three measured categories. Her performance delivered North Korea’s first gold medal of the Games and made her the first woman to claim three Asian Games weightlifting titles. A large contingent of Japan’s North Korean community cheered her lifts inside the Nagoya Trade and Industry Center.
Ri opened the competition by lifting 94kg in the snatch, improving the previous world standard by one kilogram. She then cleared 116kg in the clean and jerk before raising that record again with a final lift of 121kg. The two best lifts produced a 215kg total, seven kilograms above the previous world mark.
The result gave the 28-year-old a third continental title across three editions of the Games. She won at 48kg in Jakarta in 2018 and at 49kg in Hangzhou in 2023. AFP reported that only three male lifters had previously won three Asian Games gold medals in weightlifting: Iran’s Mohammad Nassiri and Behdad Salimi, and South Korea’s Kim Tae-hyun. No weightlifter has won four.
India’s Mirabai Chanu took silver with a 198kg total, combining an 87kg snatch with a 111kg clean and jerk. Indonesia’s Diana Tri Wijayana earned bronze at 191kg after lifting 88kg in the snatch and 103kg in the clean and jerk. For Chanu, the Tokyo Olympic silver medallist and 2017 world champion, the result was her first Asian Games medal.
Ri’s records came under a recently revised international classification system. The International Weightlifting Federation introduced new weight categories on August 1 as the sport prepares for the next Olympic cycle and reset the corresponding world-record standards. Athletes who exceed those new standards are recognized as setting new world records. Ri surpassed the thresholds decisively rather than merely matching them.
The Olympic path is less direct. The women’s 49kg class will not be contested at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, where the weightlifting programme is set to contain six divisions for women and six for men. Asked whether she could move to 53kg, the lowest women’s Olympic category, Ri indicated that she would consider the change.
Ri has not competed at an Olympics. North Korea stayed away from the delayed Tokyo Games during the Covid-19 pandemic and did not qualify weightlifters for Paris in 2024. In Nagoya, however, she combined a successful title defence with three benchmark lifts and another place in Asian Games history.
