Rufat Riskiyev

Rufat Asadovich Riskiyev was born on 2 October 1949; sources give his birthplace differently: Akkurgan in the Tashkent region, or the Kukcha neighbourhood of Tashkent. He grew up in a doctor's family.

From the age of 12 he boxed in Tashkent under the renowned coach Sidney Jackson, from 14 he trained with the Burevestnik sports society, and from 1966 under Boris Granatkin. Between 1969 and 1976 he won international tournaments in Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and he took the Cuba Open in 1973 and 1974.

He was USSR champion in 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1976. In 1974, at the first amateur World Championships in Havana, he won the 75 kg title (he is said to have fought with a broken hand, discovered later) and became the first world champion from Uzbekistan; the same year he was named Honoured Master of Sport of the USSR.

At the 1976 Montreal Olympics he was the only Soviet boxer to reach a final, in the middleweight class, beating Jorma Taipale of Finland, Iliyan Dimitrov of Bulgaria, Siraj-ud-Din of Pakistan and Luis Martinez of Cuba. In the final he lost to the American Michael Spinks when the referee stopped the bout in the third round, taking silver. He left top-level sport after the Games.

He later headed a department at the Tashkent Polytechnic Institute (1977–1979) and coached at the republic's Olympic reserve school (1979–1984); he graduated from the Uzbek State Institute of Physical Culture in 1977. In 1997 he joined the WBA referees' section and became the first international-level professional boxing referee in Central Asia. Since 1999 Tashkent has held youth tournaments named after him.

He received the orders El-yurt hurmati (1999) and Do'stlik (2020). In 1980 he appeared in episodes of two films. He died on 15 August 2026, aged 76.