Yang placed fourth and just missed medaling in the individual vault final at the 2010 World Championships in Rotterdam, and would later become vault champion at the 2010 Asian Games and then 2011 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Tokyo, Japan. In 2012, he became the first Korean gymnast to win Olympic gold in gymnastics, winning the vault competition in London. In 2013, he went on to win gold in vault at the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia. He is famous in the gymnastics world for performing one of the five hardest vaults in the world, the Yang Hak Seon, which is a front handspring on and into three twists off in a layout position. It was unveiled in the individual vault final at the 2011 World Championships, and initially carried the highest ever difficulty score (D-score) of 7.4 in men's vault at the time under the 2009-2012 Code of Points (CoP). The difficulty value of the Yang Hak Seon has been adjusted at the beginning of subsequent quads since, initially down to 6.4 under the 2012-2016 CoP and now further to 6.0 under the current 2017-2020 CoP. The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) regularly reassesses and adjusts D-scores (typically down) due to the steady advancement of general skill levels over time in gymnastics, especially on vault because of its D-scores being assigned numeric values instead of alphabetical representations like with the other apparatuses—vault is the only apparatus in gymnastics to have that simply due to the nature of the apparatus. Yang is additionally said to be working on a second difficult vault, but this one is a sideways entry.