By Erin Kayata
When Matthew Tung came to Northeastern, he’d just won his first weightlifting competition in high school.
Now, a year after graduating, he’s become the first person from Hong Kong in over a decade to compete internationally in weightlifting, placing fifth in the Asian Weightlifting Championships.
“That was a big event for me in terms of weightlifting,” said Tung, who’s now living in southern California and studying to be a physical therapist. “I’ve never competed on a scale like that. Most of the competitions I’ve done have been very local. The Asian Championships is the first big international competition I’ve done. It was very surreal. It felt like a culmination of everything I’ve done before that.”
Tung graduated from Northeastern in 2023 with a degree in health sciences. After graduating, he decided to take a gap year before applying to school to become a physical therapist. During this time, he decided to take a job as a research assistant at the Hong Kong Sports Institute, a national training facility for professional athletes. Tung worked with the national fencing team that went on to win a gold medal for Hong Kong, one of two the country would get during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
