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Uzbekistan’s para-athletes returned from the fifth Asian Para Games in Aichi-Nagoya with 145 medals — 45 gold, 49 silver and 51 bronze — finishing third in the overall team standings and setting a new national record for any edition of the Games. The result surpassed every previous Uzbek performance at the competition by a wide margin.
The scale of the achievement becomes clearer against the broader field. More than 40 countries sent athletes to Japan, but only 31 of them placed competitors on the podium at all. Of those, just 22 nations won a single gold medal, and only seven delegations accumulated 100 or more medals in total. Uzbekistan, with 45 golds, ranked among the upper tier of that select group.
Para athletics leads the way
The strongest individual discipline was para athletics, where Uzbek competitors took 20 gold, 21 silver and 23 bronze medals. The sport has established Uzbekistan as one of the leading nations in the discipline not only across Asia but globally, and the Aichi-Nagoya results reinforced that standing.
Across all disciplines, Uzbekistan’s athletes broke or set more than 15 world, Asian and Asian Para Games records during the competition. The Games as a whole produced 81 Asian records and 27 world records, with a combined total of 108 world and Asian marks updated across all competing nations.
A decade of growth
The trajectory of Uzbekistan’s para-sport programme over the past sixteen years illustrates how sharply the country’s competitive level has risen. At the 2010 Guangzhou Games, the delegation returned with six medals — one gold, two silver and three bronze. By the 2014 Incheon Games that figure had grown to 31, including 22 golds. Jakarta 2018 brought 70 medals (21 gold, 24 silver, 25 bronze), and Hangzhou 2022 yielded 71 (22 gold, 18 silver, 31 bronze).
The jump to 145 medals in Aichi-Nagoya therefore represents roughly double the output of either of the two previous editions, with the gold-medal count more than doubling from the 22 won in both Incheon and Hangzhou.
Uzbekistan competed across 11 sports at the Games. The delegation was supported with modern training camps and preparation facilities ahead of the competition, according to the official account of the results.
Looking ahead
The next major targets for Uzbekistan’s para-sport programme are the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles and the sixth Asian Para Games, scheduled for Doha, Qatar in 2030. Officials expressed confidence that the Aichi-Nagoya results would serve as a foundation for further progress at both events.