Mulyayeva decided to drop her specialty event, the 200 m individual medley, and experiment with the 50 m freestyle, when she competed for her third time at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She achieved a FINA B-standard of 26.30 from the Kazakhstan Open Championships in Almaty. She challenged seven other swimmers in heat seven, including fellow three-time Olympic veteran Mariya Bugakova of Uzbekistan. She raced to sixth place by three hundredths of a second (0.03) behind Hong Kong's Elaine Chan in 26.57. Mulyayeva failed to advance into the semifinals, as she placed forty-sixth overall out of 92 swimmers in the preliminaries.