Paddlers: Three in a row for the Dmitriys

Dmitriy Torlopov and Dmitriy Kaltenberger became the first paddlers to win the same event at three consecutive Asian Games when the Kazakhstan pair crossed the line first in the men's K2 500m at West Bay Lagoon in a time of 1:36.390.

The Kazakh paddlers had been in impressive form on the flatwater and were expected to ease their way to another gold medal, which they duly did by 0.812 seconds from Sergey Borzov and Aleksey Babadjanov of Uzbekistan.

For Borzov it was his second silver medal of the afternoon, the 25 year-old having finished behind Liu Haitao of China in the K1 500m final. This time though he got a little revenge of sort, finishing ahead of the Chinese crew.

Li Zhen, the men's K2 1000m gold medalist with Lin Mao on Monday, and Zhou Peng had come through the 250m mark in fifth place, but produced the fastest second half of the race to take the bronze, 1.204 seconds behind the winners.

The title was Torlopov and Kaltenberger's fourth in Asian Games history, having also won the K2 1000m in 2002 and means they join an elite group of athletes to have one four or more gold medals in canoe-kayak.

Li said: "In the last 200m we tried to keep our own rhythm and pace. The important point is not to let others disturb your pace and this was part of our coach's strategy.

"Our performance wasn't up to our usual standard. We could have done better. We didn't achieve our goal today but we will try harder."

Kazakhstan also claimed a surprise gold in the men's C2 500m final when Alexandr Dyadchuk and Kaissar Nurmaganbetov beat defending champions Wang Bing and Yang Wenjun of China by 0.540 seconds.

Wang and Yang, who had defended his C1 500m crown 70 minutes earlier on the Lagoon, had been expected to come good in the final having failed to create waves in their heat and semifinal and therefore been drawn in lane six.

The winning time for Dyadchuk and Nurmaganbetov was 1:45.801 with the bronze medal going to the Uzbekistan pair of Rustam Mirzadiyarov and Maksim Kiryanov, who finished 1.196 seconds behind the Chinese.

Nurmaganbetov added: "I am so happy I feel perfect. [In the last 100m] we were telling ourselves keep going, keep going, no matter what we had to win."

There was better news for China in the last event of the programme - the women's K2 500m race - when favourites Zhu Minyuan and Yu Lamei gave them their sixth of the 10 gold medals available in canoe-kayak.

Yu had insisted after the semifinal that they would "not be happy with anything less than the gold medal", but they nearly had to settle for silver, only a late push seeing them pip Shinobu Kitamoto and Mikiko Takeya of Japan on the line to deny the Japanese their first ever canoe-kayak gold medal.

The Chinese pair had trailed their Japanese rivals by only 0.12 seconds at the 250m mark, but finished strongly to clock 1:46.901 and take the victory by 0.484 seconds to extend China's perfect record in the event to five out of five golds.

Korean kayakers Lee Sun Ja and Lee Ae Yeon came through to take the bronze medal, exactly a second ahead of Ekaterina Shubina and Yulia Bozova of Uzbekistan, the latter having won the K1 500m crown 50 minutes earlier.

Zhu admitted: "This gold medal is important to us as it is the last gold in this event and we decided that we had to put a happy ending to it, so we had loads of pressure in the beginning, but we also did our best in fighting with all kinds of difficulties."

15th Asian Games, Doha 2006