Olympic bronze medalist in Sydney, 2000, Aleksei BUDOLIN of Estonia has taken on challenges domestically and internationally, with the most recent seeing him based in Switzerland, coaching Nils STUMP to the nations first ever World title. Now he has set his sights further afield…
Actually I was looking for the new challenge, and to find a team such as Uzbekistan, it is really good for my personal development. It’s a new step, before I was in smaller countries with fewer athletes, and now I have a big team with a coaching staff.
I really like the mindset of the Uzbekistan team, they are really like a family, they eat together, fight together, do many things together and this is also my style. I did the same in Switzerland and Estonia, so it suits me. Now you can see on the camp the Estonian and Uzbekistan heavyweights are together, and it’s another connection we have made, building on this family.
Especially for the smaller nations, building these connections is imperative as we see on the international training camps, with many athletes having to live on the road in order to ‘keep up’ with training and the high level they’re expected to perform on. It is somewhat easy within Europe to manage this and travel to neighbouring countries, but how is Budolin managing the commute from Europe to Asia?
Right now I’m travelling between Switzerland and Uzbekistan and I haven’t spent so much time in Tashkent because of training camps and preparation for the Asian Championships and next is the World Championships, but from August I will be moving there with the family.
Our daughter is 24 soon so she will stay in Switzerland, but my wife and son, Alexander, he is 11 years old, we want to show him different cultures and to live in different places. When he’s 18 or even 20 he can decide wherever he wants to be, but I’m so happy I can give this to him.
I truly am really happy to have this opportunity, that they took me! The country’s president is now the president of their Olympic Committee, so the sport, especially boxing, judo, taekwondo and combat sports, they are ‘president level’! In Switzerland is is pretty much opposite, they invest a lot of money to make sure that everyone is doing some type of sport which is very important and great for a country, but it means that the funding is like a pyramid and high performance is not getting so much. In Uzbekistan it’s totally different, they still have many people doing sport in the country, but for high performance there is so much support and it motivates them to really reach for the medals.
Those medals included two during the last Olympic Games in Paris 2024, with Diyora KELDIYOROVA taking a historic gold in the -52kg category, and Muzaffarbek TUROBOYEV (UZB) doubling their haul with a bronze at -100kg.
Author: Thea Cowen