The gamble he placed on a small curved table has finally paid off in gold. After giving up his dream of a football career, he stumbled into teqball, fell for it and turned down a permanent factory job at a major conglomerate to chase it.
This is the story of Lee Jun-seok, 27, one of the first generation of teqball players in South Korea. On the 20th, Lee beat Ali Jalil Mezher Alleyawi of Iraq 2-0 (12-11, 12-5) in the men's singles final of the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games at the Higashi Sports Center in Nagoya, Japan, to take the gold medal. He becomes the first teqball gold medalist at an Asian Games in South Korean sports history.
Lee entered the competition with the modest aim of simply finishing on the podium. Instead he walked away with the gold he had dreamed of, becoming the inaugural men's singles champion in teqball, which made its debut as an official Asian Games event this year.
The moment the gold was secured, Lee threw his arms around the teammates who had endured the punishing training with him and broke down in tears. The anguish and frustration of the years he spent after quitting his job, giving everything to the court, turned to joy.
Teqball is a new sport that blends table tennis, football and jokgu, a Korean net game played with the feet. The Korea Teqball Association is not yet even a full member of the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee, a measure of how little known the sport remains at home.
Lee played football in the K4 League, the country's fourth tier, until he was 21. He came across teqball while playing jokgu and felt he could be good at it. The comfort with both feet that he had built up through football and jokgu became a powerful weapon on the teqball court.
Reality proved harder. With no structure in place to support full-time players, he worked as a contract production worker at LG Electronics and trained after his shifts. Then came word that teqball had been picked as an official event for this Asian Games, and Lee made a bold decision: he passed up the chance to convert to a permanent position, left the company and went all in on teqball.
Because the sport is so unfamiliar, training conditions were dismal. The national team could not even gain entry to the Jincheon National Training Center, and had to rent private practice facilities at their own expense.
Lee did not give up. He paid his own way to train in Hungary, where the sport originated, a mark of his unusual devotion to teqball.
That effort, sustained through hardship with his eyes fixed only on teqball, came into full bloom on the court in Nagoya. From the group stage through the semifinals, he did not concede a single set.
The momentum carried into the final. He wobbled at one point, trailing 5-9 in the first set, but did not break. His seasoned match management, along with fierce smashes off either foot that found every corner of the court and delicately placed drop shots, left his opponent rattled. His focus held in each of the nerve-racking exchanges late in the sets, completing a run in which he won without losing a set all tournament.
The gold medal earns him 10 pension points; 10 more would qualify him to receive a monthly stipend. An Asian Games gold is worth 10 points, a silver 2 and a bronze 1.
What is teqball?
Teqball is played on a curved table 3 meters long and 1.7 meters wide, with players sending a football-sized ball over a net to the other side, as in table tennis or jokgu. A side may touch the ball up to three times before returning it, and no player may touch it twice in a row with the same part of the body.
