President of Kazakhstan will pay a visit to the Turkmen capital for the opening of the Asian Games
At the invitation of the Turkmen leader, his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev will fly to Ashgabat and will be an honored guest of the celebrations in honor of the 5th Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, Sputnik agency reports. The opening ceremony of the Games will be held next Sunday at the main arena of the Olympic town with the participation of 150 Kazakhstani sportsmen, who are going to gather a rich harvest of awards in the Turkmen capital, competing in the following disciplines: swimming, kickboxing, muay thai, belt wrestling, chess, taekwondo (WTF), jujitsu, kurash and wrestling, light and heavy athletics, tennis, sambo, billiards, cycling and hurdle race. In 2011, Kazakhstan for the first time hosted the Winter Asiad, during which more than a thousand representatives of 27 states competed in 11 sports. Then the country, justifying the well-known thesis "even walls help when you are home", set a record of "white" Asian games in terms of the amount of gold won. Turkmenistan, where Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games are held for the first time, also intends to achieve such success - only the scale and, accordingly, the competition here is larger: delegations of 64 countries and the refugee team will challenge awards in 21 sports.
