In October 2014, at the Incheon Asiad Main Stadium, the women's high jump final was under way. Otabek Umarov, then working in South Korea before he later joined the president's security service, had come to the stadium at the invitation of colleagues. Uzbekistan's Svetlana Radzivil took gold; Nadiya Dusanova took silver. As the national anthem played and the flag rose, the entire stadium rose to its feet.
"That was the moment I first understood that sport could unite people and give an entire generation a sense of belonging and responsibility," Umarov recalled in an interview. It was a brief moment, but it was the first time he understood what sport could mean beyond competition.
A decade on, Uzbek sport is enjoying a new golden era. The country finished 13th at the Paris 2024 Olympics, its best result ever, and in 2026 it marked another milestone: qualification for the FIFA World Cup. When the final whistle blew, Umarov was the first to call the president to congratulate him. The team's last group-stage match, against Qatar, he watched together with the president in Tashkent.
"From Tashkent to Namangan, Termez and Nukus, people poured into the streets from one end of the country to the other, in tears of joy," he said. "Families who had waited decades were finally able to celebrate that moment together."
Yet Umarov does not measure this success in medals or rankings. The scene he returns to again and again is different — a 14-year-old boy in Fergana who, after watching Uzbek athletes compete in Paris, walks into a boxing gym for the first time; a new community taking shape around a sports facility that did not exist five years earlier. "The goal isn't to produce a handful of champions," he said. "It's to build a healthy nation where every citizen can lead an active life." Uzbekistan has already built mini football pitches in roughly 70 per cent of its communities, and more than a million children now play in organised football programmes. In a country where 65 per cent of the population is under 35, that is no small number.
At this point, Umarov's story moves beyond sports administration. To him, sport functions as education policy, giving young people opportunity; as health policy, lifting the nation's fitness; as social policy, building national pride; as economic policy, driving tourism and urban development; and as a diplomatic platform connecting Uzbekistan to the world. As vice-president of the Olympic Council of Asia and a member of the International Olympic Committee, he took part in the signing of more than 20 cooperation agreements in a single week. He looks less like a sports administrator than someone treating sport as part of the country's development infrastructure.
His gaze extends well beyond Uzbekistan's borders. He has repeatedly pointed out that four Asian nations placed in the world's top 15 at the Paris Olympics. "That means more than national pride," he said. "It's a signal of where the centre of gravity in world sport is heading." The role he appears to want is not that of Uzbekistan's sports chief, but of someone explaining and connecting Asia's sporting rise on the international stage.
Few people outside Uzbekistan know that it is one of only two double-landlocked countries in the world — nations that must cross at least two borders to reach the sea. For exports and manufacturing, geography itself is a cost. And yet this is also one of the world's fastest-growing economies. According to the World Bank, Uzbekistan posted average annual real GDP growth in the 6 per cent range between 2017 and 2025, and grew 7.7 per cent in 2025 alone. Over the same period, nominal GDP more than doubled, from $62.1 billion to $145 billion — a 2.33-fold increase — while S&P and Fitch both raised the country's sovereign credit rating. Umarov has not simply watched that trajectory from close by; he has helped build part of it.
Uzbekistan is now pursuing two national projects side by side. One is stadiums and an Olympic city; the other is a digital and AI hub built around IT Park. Foreign direct investment has risen from $3.3 billion in 2017 to $43 billion in 2025, a thirteenfold increase, while IT exports have grown sevenfold, from $151 million to $1.1 billion. Venture investment rose more than a hundredfold, from $3 million in 2022 to $314 million in 2025, and in that time the fintech and e-commerce platform Uzum became Central Asia's first unicorn. Oxford Insights ranks Uzbekistan first in Central Asia on AI readiness. While South Korean attention remains fixed on China and Southeast Asia, Harvard's Growth Lab forecasts that Uzbekistan will be the world's second-fastest-growing economy through 2033. If Uganda, ranked first, is growing on the back of a population boom, Uzbekistan's engine is industrial transformation.
Chinese, Russian and Turkish capital have already moved deep into this market. South Korean companies, by contrast, have barely arrived. Stadiums and training facilities, urban infrastructure, sports technology and data analytics, rehabilitation, medical and wellness services, international sporting events and tourism, youth development programmes — nearly every area Umarov describes as the next phase happens to overlap with what Korean industry already does well. "Korea is where I first felt the power of sport," he told this reporter. "Now I want to build the next chapter of Uzbek sport together with Korean companies."
China's rise became headline news in Korea only after its market had already matured. Vietnam followed the same pattern — by the time "Rising Vietnam" became a familiar phrase in Korean media and bookshops, Korean and Japanese conglomerates had already built their factories and subsidiaries in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. If that same kind of headline starts appearing on Korean bookshelves about Uzbekistan, it will already be too late.
The young man who watched Uzbekistan's flag rise in Incheon is now trying to lift his own country onto the world stage, through sport. What he wants next is not more medals, but more possibility for the young people of Uzbekistan.
Korea has already been late to opportunities like this in China and Southeast Asia. In Uzbekistan, there may still be time not to miss it again.