How did you come to armwrestling at all?

It started at 2008. We had any tables to do workouts but anyway I tried to do some things and I liked it. There was a lot of interesting things in real armwrestling which we could improve. I started my own research of Nemiroff, Worlds, ArmWars, UAL, Vendetta. I saw that there were standard rules in armwrestling and I understood that I want to follow them.

What was the problem with your federation?

Previous one was an old federation; it was not connected with WAF. It had its own rules and didn’t follow any WAF rules. They also were registered formally in our Ministry of Sport but the problem was that Ministry knew nothing about armwrestling. And they can not let two or more federation but I tried to make a new one. It took 4 to 5 years to convince goverment that we are going to be a member of WAF and we have some international events. But anyway, nothing helped. Until recently we were able to invite Mr. Assen Hajitodorov and Mr. Mircea Simionescu to Malasya. It was a little bit hard to get them because our previous problems. But they gave a picture for our ministry about what is armwrestling and if we want to make some international competition. When they explained it all everything became clear.

Why did you decide to make a World Championship and what opportunities could you give to sportsmen?

We have a lot of connections with other Asian countries: Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, we are also near Australia and New Zeeland. This part of sportsmen is quite far from World Armwrestling Championship it is Europe or America. It is very hard to get there. And we live in countries where currency is cheap especially to euro. But in that countries there are a lot of armwrestlers and we have ability just try to their limits.

When I tried to engage some guys to come here, we count that our road here will cost over 3000 euro, it’s pretty expensive for us. We need to get a good sponsor.

Firstly we had a little miscommunication with Kazakhstan. It was about why we had no contact with Asian Continental Federation. But we explained everything.

Please tell us about possible advantages and disadvantages of Worlds in Malaysia.

First and great advantage is that Malaysia and its neighbor countries are touristic country. Here is hot all the year. But a minus is that Malaysia is far from Europe. Despite this for Europeans it will be not very expensive to travel because of currency.

We will invite our neighbor countries to help us. Moreover we may introduce them to the WAF and we hope that they will come a part of world armwrestling.

AK