Artur Grigorian

Artur Grigorian was born on 20 October 1967 in Tashkent to an Armenian family from Nagorno-Karabakh. He began boxing in 1978. He won the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle, the 1991 Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR and a silver medal at the 1991 World Championships in Sydney (losing the final to Germany's Marco Rudolph), became CIS champion in 1992 and boxed at the Barcelona Olympics for the Unified Team. He graduated from the Uzbek Institute of Physical Culture in 1993.

He turned professional in 1994 under the German trainer Fritz Sdunek. On 13 April 1996 he knocked out Puerto Rico's Antonio Rivera in the 12th round to become WBO lightweight world champion, and defended the title 17 times, including against Marco Rudolph, who had beaten him in the 1991 amateur final. He lost the belt on points to Brazil's Acelino Freitas on 3 January 2004, fought once more that year and retired; he won a single comeback fight on 24 February 2009.

He later worked as a trainer at Universum Box-Promotion, where the boxers he helped included Ruslan Chagaev. He received the Mehnat shuhrati order (1996), the Uzbekiston iftixori title (1998) and the title of Honoured Athlete of Uzbekistan; one of his championship belts is kept at the Olympic Glory Museum in Tashkent.