AbstractIt is known that the normalized standard generators of the free orthogonal quantum groupO+Nconverge in distribution to a free semicircular system as N → ∞. In this note, we substantially improve this convergence result by proving that, in addition to distributional convergence, the operator normof any non-commutative polynomial in the normalized standard generators ofO+Nconverges asN→ ∞ to the operator norm of the corresponding non-commutative polynomial in a standard free semicircular system. Analogous strong convergence results are obtained for the generators of free unitary quantum groups. As applications of these results, we obtain a matrix-coefficient version of our strong convergence theorem, and we recover a well-knownL2-L∞norm equivalence for noncommutative polynomials in free semicircular systems.