IFA World Armwrestling Championships return to Baku with open entries

Baku hosted the 2025 IFA World Armwrestling Championships from 26 October to 1 November, and the entry sheet mattered as much as the table. Medals were not decided in one clean open bracket, but inside a class matrix built on gender, age, weight and impairment, which meant a single championship actually contained several competitions running at once. National federations handled registration for their athletes, while competitors from countries without an IFA-member federation could enter individually.

That structure is what makes armwrestling look simple from the outside and complicated once the start list lands. The IFA invitation placed junior, masters, senior and disabled divisions under the same world championship umbrella, and it set no limit on how many athletes a nation could enter in one category. For a country with depth, that opens the door to real volume at a weight class like senior men’s 78 kg or women’s 63 kg, not just one headline name.

The class ladder was exact. The IFA’s official weight sheet split athletes into U15, U18, U21, senior, masters, grandmasters, senior grandmasters and ultra grandmasters, with separate men’s and women’s divisions. Senior men were set at 57, 63, 70, 78, 86, 95, 105 and over 105 kg. Senior women were listed at 52, 57, 63, 70, 78 and over 78 kg. The same documents also laid out para categories for physical-impaired standing and sitting, visual-impaired standing and hearing-impaired standing, a reminder that this sport’s championship map is wider than the casual two-person table image suggests.

The rules made the path to a medal even more specific. IFA tournaments were double elimination, so every athlete had to lose twice to be knocked out, and there was no fixed seeding before championships. Instead, contestants were placed on the draw through a randomized scoring system, which can turn first-round matchups into something far less predictable than a standard bracket. In practice, that means a dangerous puller can be buried deep in the draw without being protected by reputation.

The international calendar around Baku showed how the sport keeps spreading its biggest events across multiple stages. The IFA is registered in Zurich and says its founding federations came from Finland, Poland and Ukraine, with Anders Axklo serving as president and Denise Wattles as general secretary. The World Armwrestling Federation dates to 1977, and its first world championships were held in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, Canada, in 1979. The WAF schedule also pointed to the 2026 European and Para-Armwrestling Championships in Budapest, Hungary, another sign that armwrestling crowns champions in layers, not one all-or-nothing bracket.