Jo Gwang-hee and Kim Hyo-bin won the men's K2 500m canoe sprint at the Asian Games, giving South Korea its first title in the event since 1990. The pair finished in 1 minute 31.859 seconds, beating Japan by 0.317 seconds. Iran took bronze. The result ended a 36-year wait for a Korean gold medal in the K2 500m.
The victory also made Jo and Kim the first South Korean athletes to win two gold medals at these Games. A day earlier, they had been part of the winning K4 500m crew. For Jo, the K2 title added another Asian Games gold to a career that already included medals across several editions, while Kim converted the strong K4 performance into a second championship with the smaller boat.
The narrow margin over Japan shows how little separated the leading crews. South Korea had trailed Japan in the preliminary stage, so the final required a faster and cleaner race. The two-gold sequence now gives the canoe sprint program one of the Korean team's strongest multi-event performances of the Games and restores the country to the top of an event it had not won for more than three decades.