Dhenver Castillo claims silver in tight Asian Beach Games foil race

Dhenver John Castillo kept the Philippines on the podium in the kind of foil race that punishes anything less than sharp. At the 6th Asian Beach Games in Sanya, China, he took silver in the boys’ foil windsurfing event at Sanya Bay Haihong Square, finishing behind China’s Yiguo Wang and ahead of Thailand’s Wachirawit Thonup in a race that came down to the thinnest point margin.

The final numbers tell the story. Castillo and Thonup both finished the 13-race marathon with 39 net points, but Castillo’s 58 total points edged Thonup’s 57 and locked up second place. Wang won gold comfortably on 12 net points, a gap that showed just how hard it is to close out a continental foil series once a rider starts stacking clean finishes. In a discipline where one bad tack or one messy launch can cost multiple places, the difference between silver and bronze was one point over a full series.

That makes Castillo’s result more than a medal line. It lands as another proof point for the Philippines’ young foil pipeline, because he is not arriving from nowhere. Castillo had already won gold in the men’s U19 iQFoil at the 2025 SEA Games in Thailand on December 17, finishing a five-day, 16-race series with 19 net points. Add that to his Sanya silver and the picture gets clear fast: Castillo is building results across different foil formats, not just catching one good run.

The setting mattered too. The sailing competition at the Asian Beach Games ran from April 23 to 28 at Haihong Square in Sanya Bay and drew 116 sailing competitors from 16 nations. Foil windsurfing and Formula Kite were both part of the program, the kind of high-speed classes organizers have tied to the Olympic boom that began at Paris 2024. Wang, listed in official and state-media reports as 20 years old, beat a field that included one of the region’s most established young foil racers. Philippine coverage described Castillo as a teen star, and this result backed that up.

For foil riders watching from the beach or the service area, the lesson is in the race shape. Castillo did not need a highlight-reel heat win to matter. He needed repeatable speed, clean starts, smart recovery after bad legs, and the discipline to survive a long points series. That is what silver looked like in Sanya, and it is exactly why the Philippines now has a rider to track every time a youth foil start line goes up in Asia.