 Zou was the second Chinese Olympian to receive three gold medals at a single Olympic Games, following Li Ning who first achieved the feat at the 1984 Summer Olympics, and was the most successful Chinese athlete at the Beijing Olympics, with the most gold medal wins.During the 2009 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in London, Zou won a gold medal in the individual horizontal bar event and also won a silver medal at the floor exercise individual event.After being left out of the Chinese Gymnastic Team at both the 2010 World Championships in Rotterdam and 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou due to weaknesses in the apparatuses he did not specialize in, Zou again won two gold and one silver medals at the 2011 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Tokyo, matching his feat back in 2009.