Eight years after leaving his first Asian Games without a medal, the two-time Olympic champion won the floor exercise in Nagoya by 0.066 points. He has two more finals on Friday.

Carlos Yulo had to wait for two other men to finish before he knew. By the time Japan’s Shoma Tsukiyama stepped onto the floor at the Nagoya City General Gymnasium on Thursday, September 24, Yulo’s score was already on the board, and it wasn’t safe. Tsukiyama came up 0.1 short. Kazakhstan’s Milad Karimi, the last gymnast of the night, got closer, posting 14.600 against Yulo’s 14.666. The 0.066-point gap held, and the two-time Olympic champion had the one major title that had eluded him for eight years, gold in the men’s floor exercise at the 2026 Asian Games. It was also the Philippines’ first gold medal of these Games.

Gymnastics fans have seen this finish before. Yulo won his first Olympic gold on the same apparatus in Paris in 2024 by 0.034 points. Two of the biggest floor titles of his career have now been decided by less than a tenth of a point.

The Gap in the Trophy Case

By the start of this week, Yulo had won nearly every major competition open to a gymnast. He holds two Olympic golds (floor exercise and vault, Paris 2024), World Championship titles, a stack of Southeast Asian Games titles, and a dozen golds at the Asian Championships, including floor exercise this June in Zunyi, China, where his younger brother Eldrew took bronze on the same podium. The Asian Games, the continent’s Olympics-style multi-sport event held every four years, was the exception.

Timing kept getting in the way. Yulo made his Asian Games debut as an 18-year-old in Jakarta in 2018 and left without a medal, placing seventh on floor. He skipped Hangzhou entirely because it clashed with the 2023 World Championships, the qualifying meet for the Paris Olympics. That made Nagoya his first real shot at the title as the gymnast he is now. Before the Games, he said he wanted to make up for it.

A Rough Monday, a Clean Thursday

Three days earlier, the win looked far less certain. In Monday’s qualification round, which doubled as the individual all-around, Yulo missed the landing on his first vault and fell on the horizontal bar. He still topped floor qualifying with 14.600, and he was blunt about the rest. “There are still finals to compete in; there are still chances to win a medal,” he told reporters afterward.

Thursday’s routine was close to clean. Floor exercise in men’s artistic gymnastics is scored in two parts: a difficulty score, which rewards how hard the skills are, and an execution score out of 10, which loses points for every bent knee, extra step, or unsteady landing. Yulo scored 5.7 for difficulty and 8.966 for execution. Karimi took silver. Tsukiyama, who also finished second to Yulo at June’s Asian Championships, took bronze. Yulo celebrated with his coach, Aldrin Castañeda.

The Other Yulo in the Final

A second Filipino made the eight-man final. His 18-year-old brother, Karl Eldrew Yulo, qualified fourth for floor at his first Asian Games and finished seventh on Thursday with 12.233. The two have competed side by side all week. In Wednesday’s team final, where the Philippines placed sixth, Eldrew was the only Filipino to compete on all six apparatuses. Carlos has openly admitted his brother is the better gymnast on the high bar, and that he goes to Eldrew for advice on it. “It’s really an honour to represent our country together with my brother,” Carlos said during the Games.

Friday Could Make It Three

Yulo has two more apparatus finals on Friday, September 25: vault, where he’s the reigning Olympic champion despite a stumble in qualifying that left him seventh, and parallel bars, where he qualified sixth. Before the Games, Gymnastics Association of the Philippines president Cynthia Carrion predicted Yulo could come home with three golds, from floor, vault, and either rings or parallel bars. Floor was the first of those. Eldrew also competes Friday in the horizontal bar final, and teammate Juancho Miguel Besana, the 2023 SEA Games vault champion, joins Carlos in the vault final.

Update, September 25: Yulo won the vault too, averaging 14.599 to beat Iran’s Mahdi Olfati by 0.066 points, the same margin as his floor title. Here’s how he came back from Monday’s fall to take his second Asian Games gold.

The win is also the delegation’s first gold. The Philippine Olympic Committee set a target of eight golds for these Games, double the country’s best Asian Games showing since the 1950s, and the campaign had gone six days without one. ElysPlanet’s running hub on the Philippines’ 2026 Asian Games campaign tracks the full medal count, who’s still in contention, and what’s left before the October 4 closing ceremony.

Friday’s Finals

• When: Friday, September 25, 2026, men’s vault, parallel bars, and horizontal bar apparatus finals
• Where: Nagoya City General Gymnasium (Rainbow Hall), Nagoya, Japan
• Filipinos competing: Carlos Yulo (vault, parallel bars), Juancho Miguel Besana (vault), Karl Eldrew Yulo (horizontal bar)