Kazakhstan

South Korea had run Asian women's handball for years, and it took a one-goal final to break that in 2010: Kazakhstan won 33-32, taking the Asian Championship on Kazakh soil after coming through with the tighter nerve in the closing minutes. Fourteen years later they did it again, adding the 2024 title and turning what had looked like a one-off into a pattern. South Korea remains the team Kazakhstan measures itself against, and it has not always gone their way — the 2006 Asian Games final went to the Koreans, part of a run in which Kazakhstan settled for silver in Busan and Doha before dropping to bronze at the next two Games, in Guangzhou and Incheon.

The men's side has never matched that. Its best Asian Games finish is seventh, from 1982, and a third place at the 1987 Asian Men's Championship stands as the high point of a much thinner record.

Zhannat Aitenova has kept goal through more than a hundred caps, long enough to see the team's fortunes turn from also-rans to Asian champions. Arailym Abdikhamit, a 1.95-metre pivot, carried the team's attack from the 2015 World Championship through to the 2024 Asian title. Behind them, the Kostanay handball school has kept sending players through into the senior squad.

Kazakhstan has no fixed home ground. Almaty carries most of the fixtures, split between the Almaty Arena, built primarily for ice hockey, and the Baluwan Sholak Sports Palace, which staged the 2010 Asian Women's Championship — the tournament the team won on its own doorstep.

The federation itself predates the country's handball independence by decades, set up in 1957 as the Kazakh SSR's handball body. It only became Kazakhstan's own federation, answering to the International Handball Federation and its Asian counterpart, once the Soviet Union broke apart in 1992.