"Azerbaijan never rests on the laurels in sport"

Azerbaijan always aspires to develop sports in the republic and never rests on the laurels, President of the Azerbaijan Athletic Federation, Vice President of the National Olympic Committee of Azerbaijan Chingiz Huseynzade said, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza about the upcoming major competitions in the country and the participation of Azerbaijani athletes in international tournaments abroad.

"A lot of events will be held in Azerbaijan this year, and all of them are very important for us. In particular, several world championships in different sports will be held in Baku. On June 5-9, the BMX World Championships of the International Cycling Union will be held. On September 20-27, we will hold World Judo Championships, it will be a very significant event," he said.

"In addition, we will host the European Trampoline Championships on April 9-16, the European Mas-Wrestling Championship - on August 3-6. A number of gymnastics tournaments will be held within the World Cup -  in artistic gymnastics - on March 15-18, in rhythmic gymnastics - on 27-29 April, in acrobatics - on November 17-18. A very important event is the third race of the Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which will be held on April 27-29," Chingiz Huseynzadeh noted.

"From the foreign tournaments, the October 6-18 Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games are important for us in the first place, for which we are preparing very seriously. In particular, tomorrow there will be a meeting with participation of all federations that intend to send their athletes to these games. The Volleyball Women's World Championship is also very interesting, it will be held in Japan on September 30 - October 21. Our team participates in the final stage of this tournament. That is, there are a lot of home events and foreign competitions, we hope that  we'll be great in both organization of competitions and our results," the vice president of the NOC stressed.

The NOC is currently discussing sports that should be also developed in Azerbaijan. "We are discussing several options, as the Olympic program was updated, rock climbing and other sports were included in it. We plan to develop these disciplines to the extent possible. But the traditional sports are still our main force, in which we will participate at the Olympic Games and I hope we will please our fans in Tokyo," he concluded.