Vladimir BAKULIN

Vladimir Bakulin was born in a remote Siberian village and only took up wrestling in 1958, when he enrolled at the Kazakh National Technical University. Bakulin rose to the Soviet national team in 1965, winning his first medal, a silver, at the Soviet championships in Greco-Roman flyweight class and he competed at four major international tournaments during his career. Bakulin was the European Greco-Roman flyweight champion in 1966 and won the World title in the same class the next year and went to the 1968 Olympics as one of the favorites for gold. But at the Olympics, Bakulin had to settle for a silver medal when he lost in the fifth round to Bulgarian Petar Kirov, who would dominate the Greco-Roman flyweight class for the next eight years. After the Olympics, Bakulin switched to bantamweight, but was less successful, finishing only seventh at the 1970 World Championships, after which he ended his sporting career. Domestically, Bakulin never won a Soviet title and besides his 1965 silver, he won two other silvers at the Soviet nationals – in 1967 Greco-Roman flyweight and in 1970 Greco-Roman bantamweight.

Bakulin graduated from the Kazakh National Technical University with an engineering degree in 1966 and from Kazakh National University (now named Al-Farabi University) with a journalism degree in 1974. From 1970-79, Bakulin worked as a wrestling coach with Lokomotiv Almaty, while from 1979-86 he was a lecturer in Kazakh Academy of Architecture and Construction. From 1986 until his retirement at the end of the 1980s, Bakulin worked with the Kazakh national newspaper Karavan.