PISTON RING

A piston ring (1) is provided with a thermal spray coating (3) that contains tungsten carbide and chrome carbide as a hard phase, and contains nickel as a metallic binder phase, and is characterized in that the thermal spray coating (3) is formed by the spraying of a thermal spray powder that has been produced by means of a granulation sintering method, and that contains hard particles in which the mean particle diameter of the tungsten carbide has been adjusted by means of a BET method to fall within a range of not less than 0.15 µm and not more than 0.45 µm.