Tashkent has hosted the Asian Bodybuilding Championships twice: the 46th took place in the capital on 1 June 2012 with representatives of 25 countries, and the 49th ran from 29 September to 4 October 2015, when, according to the federation's report, 23 countries brought more than 300 athletes. The first Asian line in the achievement lists belongs to Alexander Sakharov: on 1 September 2013 in Vietnam he won the athletic physique over 175 cm category. All of this sits in the public archive of the Uzbekistan Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation: 137 tournaments from 1987 to 2025, 2,579 photographs in the tournament entries and 140 documents; across the whole archive, together with personal pages and calendars, 2,623 images. This article retells the archive, not anyone's memory.
Tashkent hosted the Asian Championships twice: in 2012 and in 2015
The continental title first came to Uzbekistan in 2012. The archive entry on the 46th Asian Bodybuilding Championships puts it briefly: representatives of 25 countries competed for the medals, among them Japan, South Korea, Iran, Oman, Qatar, India, Pakistan, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. The tournament is filed under the IFBB. The entry carries 60 photographs.
The second time, three years later, Tashkent hosted the 49th Asian Bodybuilding and Physique Championships, from 29 September to 4 October 2015, together with the ABBF Congress. The federation's report gives the numbers: 23 countries and more than 300 athletes. In the same text the federation explains why it treats this as a threshold.
"That Tashkent is in Asia is common knowledge. But 'Asia' in Tashkent seemed, until recently, an impossible undertaking."
The first Asian line: 1 September 2013, Vietnam
The team's Asian medal count begins with the 47th Asian Championships of 2013 in Vietnam, which opened on 30 August. Alexander Sakharov won the athletic physique over 175 cm category; in his achievement table in the 2026 monograph that line is dated 1 September 2013.
The archive itself adds one caveat: this was not the first trip of any kind. The report on the Vietnam trip states plainly that "there had already been historic outings to competitions of this level, and even bright victories". What was new was the format: "a team trip of athletes across several categories, six in all, is a new stage in the development of national bodybuilding". The same report names the support of the Olympic Committee and of the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the republic. The entry preserves 44 photographs.
How Uzbekistan entered the Asian calendar: WBPF and ABBF
The Uzbekistan Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation was founded in 2006. According to the 2026 book, the notices of admission to the WBPF and the ABBF arrive on 31 December 2012, and in the first days of January 2013 the federation's website announces that the federation has officially joined the world federation WBPF and the Asian federation ABBF.
One caveat matters here, without which the picture goes wrong. The 2012 Tashkent tournament is filed in the archive under the IFBB, while from 2013 the team's main Asian line runs through the ABBF and the WBPF. A third line also exists: the 2019 Asian Championships under the NABBA in Almaty, where Bahromjon Boymirzaev became overall champion in men's physique. These are different organisations, and adding their titles into a single total is not correct.
Asian championships in the federation archive: 2012 to 2022
| Year | Tournament | Place and dates | What is on record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 46th Asian Championships (IFBB) | Tashkent, 1 June 2012 | Representatives of 25 countries; 60 photographs in the entry |
| 2013 | 47th Asian Championships (ABBF—WBPF) | Vietnam, from 30 August 2013 | A team of six athletes; gold for Alexander Sakharov; 44 photographs |
| 2014 | 48th Asian Championships | The entry itself gives neither venue nor dates; the attached ABBF documents speak of the tournament and congress in Macau, 26 August to 1 September 2014 | No team results in the entry; 30 photographs, 6 documents |
| 2015 | 49th Asian Championships (ABBF—WBPF—UzFBF) | Tashkent, 29 September to 4 October 2015 | 23 countries, more than 300 athletes, ABBF Congress; gold for Mikhail Volynkin (juniors, overall) and Pavel Umurzakov (up to 90 kg), silver for Alexander Sakharov; 90 photographs |
| 2016 | 50th Asian Championships | Thimphu, Bhutan, 2 to 8 September 2016 | Silver for Mikhail Volynkin (over 100 kg), bronze for Vladimir Volynkin (juniors over 75 kg), silver for Pavel Umurzakov up to 90 kg and silver among masters, 5th place for Farkhod Subkhankulov (up to 80 kg) |
| 2017 | Asian Championships (ABBF—WBPF), no number in the entry | Seoul, South Korea, 20 to 26 August 2017 | Gold for Gulzhakhon Turdikulova (model physique); silver for Elena Nuraeva, Mikhail Volynkin (over 100 kg) and Dilshod Niyazov |
| 2018 | 52nd Asian Championships (ABBF—WBPF) | Pune, India, 2 to 8 October 2018 | Six first places: Pavel Umurzakov, Elena Bekirova ("gold x 2"), Gulzhakhon Turdikulova, Elena Nuraeva and Davronbek Tuygunov; silver for Vladimir Volynkin and Bakhshulla Sayfullaev |
| 2019 | 53rd Asian Championships (ABBF—WBPF) | Batam, Indonesia; no date in the entry, the monograph dates these lines 1 October 2019 | Gold for Rushana Maksumova, Angelina Osipyan and Donyor Khasanov; silver for Pavel Umurzakov among masters |
| 2019 | Asian Championships (NABBA), a different organisation | Almaty, Kazakhstan, 16 November 2019 | Bahromjon Boymirzaev, overall champion in men's physique; gold for Margarita Akhmetzyanova and Abror Iminzhanov; 10 photographs |
| 2022 | 54th Asian Championships | Maldives, 15 to 21 July 2022 | Silver for Pavel Umurzakov, silver for Olesya Shokhina, bronze for Angelina Kalinina |
The table is assembled from the federation's archive entries and from the achievement lists of the 2026 monograph. Where an entry holds no full protocol, the column carries only what is actually recorded. The 2026 book sums up this stretch in a single line: of the seven seasons between 2013 and 2019, six are marked by podium places.
The names that keep returning in the Asian protocols
Read ten years in a row and you see a route rather than a spike. The same people come back to the continental stage year after year.
- Pavel Umurzakov — gold up to 90 kg in Tashkent (2015), two silvers in Bhutan (2016), gold among masters in Pune (2018), silver among masters in Batam (2019) and silver in the Maldives (2022). The monograph calls him the country's first world bodybuilding champion, a title won in 2016.
- Mikhail Volynkin — gold among juniors in the overall category at the home Asian Championships of 2015, silver over 100 kg in Bhutan (2016) and silver in the same category in Seoul (2017).
- Elena Bekirova — in Pune, "1st place (gold x 2)" in model physique among juniors and among adults, as the federation's report puts it; her personal table in the monograph carries one line for that tournament, model physique up to 165 cm.
- Davronbek Tuygunov — gold in athletic physique over 180 cm in Pune; on 22 April of the same year he won that same category at the Central Asian Championships in the Turkiston Palace in Tashkent.
- Rushana Maksumova — gold in model physique 30 to 40 years in Batam and bronze in the up to 165 cm category at the same tournament.
Women's categories: 2017 in the federation report, 2018 in the personal tables
In the personal achievement lists compiled for the 2026 monograph, women's Asian lines first appear in 2018, in Pune. Yet the federation's report from Seoul a year earlier already names Gulzhakhon Turdikulova's gold in the model physique category. The discrepancy is not a dispute over a fact but a difference in how complete the sources are: personal tables follow the athletes whose profiles made it into the monograph, and neither Turdikulova nor Nuraeva has one there, while the website reports follow the whole team. We give both dates and do not pick the convenient one.
Where the sources disagree, and why we do not hide it
Numbering. The 2014 archive entry is titled "48th Asian Championships", while the letter attached to it from Datuk Paul Chua, Secretary-General of the ABBF and the WBPF, calls the tournament and congress in Macau of 26 August to 1 September 2014 the 49th. At the same time the 2015 Tashkent tournament is the 49th in every federation source. The sequence is not continuous after that either: there is no 51st in the archive at all, and the 2017 Seoul entry carries no number whatsoever. We are not going to correct international numbering retroactively, and until a check against the ABBF we write honestly: the archive carries two different numbers.
A name. In the Seoul and Pune protocols the athlete is recorded as Elena Nuraeva. The federation's own obituary of 1 November 2022 gives a different form: Alena Nuraeva (1978 to 2022), "a multiple champion of the Republic, of Asia and of the World". We keep the protocol form in the table and name the other one here.
Dates and image counts. The 2022 Maldives stand in the archive as 15 to 21 July, and in Umurzakov's achievement table as 12 July. The size of the archive is counted differently too: the 2026 book gives 2,904 photographs, which is the book's own count; the federation site today holds 2,623 images across all entries, 2,579 of them in tournament entries. The document count agrees: 140. Calling them protocols would be wrong — the six files of the 2014 entry alone are an inspection report, the rules and regulations, an entry form, a day-to-day programme, a media accreditation form and a judges nomination form.
What stands behind these lines
Continental medals do not appear out of thin air: behind each one stand a gym, a coach and a routine. The full federation archive, 137 tournaments from 1987 to 2025, 2,579 photographs in their entries and 140 documents, is open on the website of the Uzbekistan Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation, which is headed by its president Timur Sobirov.
The name PROFORM is not new to this archive: in December 2011 the club organised the "Night of Champions" show tournament in the Zerafshan concert hall, and the PROFORM Classic festival appears in the calendars of 2013, 2014, 2019 and 2020.
PROFORM DINAMO is at Mirzo Ulugbek Avenue 8a, Tashkent, and is open around the clock. A tour of the club is free; to book it, call +998 94 045 54 48. Nobody is going to promise an Asian Championship medal in exchange for a membership. But this is where the same road begins that this article has set out year by year.