Baku: Taiwanese Olympic bronze medalist Tang Chia-hung made a golden 2026 debut on Sunday, winning the horizontal bar title at the FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Cup in Baku, Azerbaijan. Tang, who won a bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Games, secured the top spot with 15.366 points in the event. His performance was bolstered by a high execution score of 8.966 and a 0.1 bonus for a "stuck" landing. He was followed by Kazakhstan's Milad Karimi, who took silver with 15.033 points.

According to Focus Taiwan, the gold medal capped a weekend for Tang, who also finished first in the preliminary round with a 14.800-point routine at a 6.2 difficulty level. After the event, Tang expressed satisfaction to CNA for successfully executing a specific element that had eluded him at the 2025 World Championships. "That boosted my confidence a lot," he stated.

Tang acknowledged room for improvement, noting that his current training regimen focuses on the individual all-around. He plans to compete in the floor exercise, still rings, and horizontal bar at both the Baku stop and the upcoming event in Turkey. "I want to use these competitions as training to maintain my physical conditioning," he explained. "My goal is to help Taiwan secure a strong team ranking at the Asian Championships and the World Championships later this year."

Tang's coach, Huang Bo-rui, remarked that the results were "within expectations" due to the solid preparation leading up to the season opener. "I'm grateful that Tang executed his tasks well and maintained his overall scoring consistency," Huang commented.

During the winter off-season, the team focused on maintaining fitness and refining techniques, rather than on raw power, the coach added. "We aren't intentionally chasing higher difficulty right now," he said. "The priority is ensuring the quality of the overall performance and correcting specific flaws."

In other events on Sunday, Taiwan's pommel horse standout Lee Chih-kai, who won silver at the 2020 Tokyo Games, finished sixth in his signature event with 12.433 points, achieving his best score so far in 2026.