lit a candle 5h agoMy dad had this grainy VHS of the 1976 Olympic boxing finals and we must have watched the Spinks fight fifty times growing up. He always said Riskiyev was the better boxer that night, just not the lucky one. 76 years old, long illness, that's a hard way to go after everything his body took in the ring.
Their story
Rufat Riskiyev was a Soviet and Uzbek boxer who became the first boxer from Uzbekistan to win a world title. At the inaugural World Amateur Boxing Championships in Havana in 1974 he took the middleweight gold for the USSR, and two years later he won Olympic silver at the 1976…
Rufat Riskiyev was a Soviet and Uzbek boxer who became the first boxer from Uzbekistan to win a world title. At the inaugural World Amateur Boxing Championships in Havana in 1974 he took the middleweight gold for the USSR, and two years later he won Olympic silver at the 1976 Games in Montreal, losing the final to Michael Spinks. The International Boxing Association called him the Tashkent Tiger.
He was born on 2 October 1949 in Akkurgan, in what was then the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, into a doctor's family. He started boxing at 12 in Tashkent under the well known coach Sidney Jackson, trained from 14 with the Burevestnik sports society and from 1966 worked with coach Boris Granatkin. He later boxed for the Dynamo society.
Riskiyev won the Soviet championship four times, in 1972 and every year from 1974 to 1976, and was named an Honoured Master of Sport of the USSR in 1974. In Havana that year he won the 75 kg title at the first world championships, reportedly fighting with a broken hand. At Montreal in 1976 he was the only Soviet boxer to reach a final, beating Jorma Taipale, Ilya Dimitrov, Siraj ud Din and the Cuban Luis Martinez before the referee stopped his bout with Spinks in the third round. According to the IBA he had 189 bouts and won 174. He was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour after the Games.
After leaving the ring he turned to film, playing the lead role of Rufat Kudratov in the 1979 Uzbek film Na ring vyzyvaetsya, the story of a boy from a Tashkent neighbourhood who becomes world champion, and appearing in two other films in 1980. In 1997 he joined the officials' section of the World Boxing Association and became the first international professional boxing judge from Central Asia. Since 2019 a prize in his name has gone to the best boxer at the Uzbekistan championship, and in 2020 he received the Order of Dustlik. He and his wife, Mamurakhon, had six children.
His later years were marked by serious illness, and in 2016 part of his right leg was amputated because of gangrene. In 2023 the IBA granted him a lifetime pension. Riskiyev died on 15 August 2026, aged 76, after a long illness. His death was announced by the Uzbekistan Boxing Federation.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0, English and Russian); Gazeta.uz and the Uzbekistan Boxing Federation (August 2026). Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Rufat Riskiyev in February 2020
by People Forever
That tape got passed around more living rooms than people realize. Good memory to have.