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• A martial arts bow: Armenian condolences on Azeri fighter’s death

Sportsmanship to those who abide by it, sometimes it is frustrating to do the right thing with savages... This reminds me sometimes of the long convoys of thousands of Armenians lead to die by 3-4 guards, very well behaved Armenians trusting their 'country men'.... In the end who cares, survival counts and we have to stay focused on it.... There is too much hate building on their side, no matter h...

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In a telegram addressed to his Azerbaijani counterpart Ceyhun Mamedov, President of the Armenian Sambo Federation Levon Hayrapetyan said the federation of the sport in Armenia regretted the neighboring republic’s loss of a talented sambo fighter, who drowned in a lake over the weekend.

(Armenia and Azerbaijan have a history of troubled relations in sport after the bloody war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1991-1994. The unresolved conflict still affects contacts between the two countries’ sport officials and athletes).

Junior European sambo champion Mikhail Orujev, 16, drowned in a lake in Georgia on Sunday. He was a member of an Azerbaijani delegation participating in the traditional days of friendship of the peoples of Azerbaijan and Georgia in the country’s Dmanisi province. After the end of the official part of the festival, Orujev reportedly went to the lakeshore together with his friends and tried to swim across the lake, but failed.

“The Federation of Sambo of Armenia deeply regrets the incident and expresses its sincere condolences to [Orujev’s] family and friends, fellow athletes and coaches of Azerbaijan’s national sambo team, as well as the country’s whole sporting community over the tragic death of Junior World Champion Mikhail Orujev,” Hayrapetyan said in the telegram, the text of which was disseminated by the Federation (www.sambo.am) on Monday.

Sambo, which is a Russian acronym for unarmed self-defense, is a sport that has roots in Japanese judo and karate and began to develop in the Soviet Red Army in the 1920s as a hand-to-hand fight training system. Currently, it is mostly popular in former Soviet and Eastern bloc countries, including in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Interestingly, the website of the Armenian Sambo Federation was among several Armenian internet resources attacked by Azerbaijani hackers late last month. The work of the Armenian website was disrupted for some time after Azerbaijan’s flag and references to Azerbaijani media appeared on it on June 29.