A 16-year-old Kazakhstani freestyle skier who won silver in the mixed team aerials event at the 2025 Asian Games is among athletes from Central Asia who will compete at the Olympic Games in Italy this month.
With a 36-member team, Kazakhstan is sending the largest contingent from the region to the games, which run from February 6 to February 22 in Milan, Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites and other locations in northern Italy. The youngest member of the team is Asylkhan Assan, who also took tenth place for Kazakhstan at a World Cup event in China a year ago and has competed in other international competitions.
“The most important thing is to perform well. To fully demonstrate my potential and not make mistakes during the jump,” Assan said in an interview posted on the the Olympic.kz website.
The teen athlete said he got into sports when he was five years old and, with the encouragement of his grandmother, followed his sister into freestyle skiiing. The acrobatic sport features flips, twists and somersaults after skiiing off a steep jump and concludes with a hopefully clean landing on a downhill slope.
“I had injuries during my career, but my family always supported me,” he said. “I did not break down physically or psychologically.”
Assan said his role model is Gennady Golovkin, the former middleweight world champion from Kazakhstan, and that he used to wake up early to watch the boxer’s fights. Golovkin, head of Kazakhstan’s National Olympic Committee, was named president of World Boxing at the federation’s inaugural congress in Rome in November.
Freestyle skiing emerged in the 1960s at a time of social change and a push for “more more freedom of expression, even in sports,” the Olympics organization said. It was “initially called ‘hotdogging’ because it involved a mix of acrobatic moves, aerials, and adrenaline,” it said.
The International Ski Federation recognised freestyle as a discipline in 1979, introduced guidelines to make it safer and held the first events in the following year. It made its Olympic debut as a demonstration sport at the games in Calgary, Canada in 1988.
The town of Livigno will host the freestyle skiiing and snowboarding events at this year’s Winter Olympics.
