President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov attended February 7 the official opening ceremony of the 22nd Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi.
Our country is represented at the Olympics by a group of athletes who succeeded in qualifying competitions, including the mountain skiers Ksenia Grigorieva and Artyom Voronov, as well as the figure skater Misha Ge. The state flag of the Republic of Uzbekistan was raised in the Olympic village on February 5 in honor of our national team.
The 22nd Winter Olympics is sixth in a row that the national team of the independent Uzbekistan is taking part in.
Our nation was represented as a sovereign team for the first time in 1994 at the 17th Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, and it was that very contest that at once our athletes made a remarkable achievement: a gold medal was earned in freestyle.
Over the past years, Uzbekistan’s representatives won 6 gold, 5 silver and 11 bronze medals in the Olympics, while in the Asian Games our athletes won 54 gold, 76 silver and 93 bronze medals. Such accomplishments are indicative of Uzbekistan’s mounting consolidation in the community of those nations where sports are placed in the core of government priorities, yielding momentous fruits in the form of accelerated promotion of sports.
Today, sports have a growing significance and popularity with the younger generation of our people. Some two million children in Uzbekistan are regular in more than 30 types of sports, according to the head of our state – Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Fund for the Development of Children’s Sports Islam Karimov. National teams of our country in Olympic sports are shaped at schools of higher sporting mastery who host around 2,000 athletes.
In general, more than 5.5 thousand Olympians and members of national teams of around 90 countries are taking part in the 22nd Winter Games in Sochi.
The official opening ceremony of the Games took place in the Olympic Stadium Fisht on February 7 with heads of leading nations of the world attending the occasion. The colorful festivities culminated in the ceremony of setting the Olympic flame.
* * *
President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov met with the President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov as part of his trip to Sochi. During the talks the two sides exchanged views on bilateral relations between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as well as other issues of shared interest.
