Hulunbuir (TIP)- At the felicitation function for the Indian chess contingent, back from the Budapest Olympiad with four individual golds and the team golds, grandmaster Abhijit Kunte had an anecdote to share from his first Olympiad. The year was 1998, and the scene was set in Elista, a city in Russia’s Kalmykia republic.
“Garry Kasparov was playing in the Elista Olympiad. We used to go before the games started to take his autograph. Kasparov would give autographs only on chess books written by him,” recounts Kunte. “This time, when I went to the Olympiad in Budapest, I saw children running for autographs of our Indian players. We are no more seeking autographs, we are giving them,” said Kunte, captain of the women’s team.
Over the course of a heady fortnight in Budapest, the axis of the world of chess had tilted decisively — towards India. At this year’s Chess Olympiad in the Hungarian capital, the Indian chess contingent swept the three team gold medals on offer — the ‘Hamilton-Russell Cup’ for the open section, the ‘Vera Menchik Cup’ for the women’s section and the ‘Nona Gaprindashvili Trophy’ for the overall title. To add to those three team golds, there were also four individual golds won by Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi, Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal.
The Indian team in the open section of the Olympiad — a biennial team event where over 180 nations participated — was so dominant that it finished four points ahead of five other teams who ended second, the United States of America, Uzbekistan, China, Serbia and Armenia. At the last Olympiad in Chennai in 2022, the Indian chess contingent came close to winning two gold medals, but stumbled at the final hurdle. But this time, there was no stopping the Indians. “If this success had come in the Chennai Olympiad two years ago, it would have had the sense of a slight accident. A pleasant surprise. At the Budapest Olympiad, very quickly, by the fourth round itself, I had the feeling, ‘which team is going to stop them?’ And we know the answer. They won by a four-point gap,” five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand said at an event in Mumbai.
On the live world rankings, which are updated in real-time, there are currently three Indians in the top 10 — Gukesh, Arjun and Anand — with Praggnanandhaa just outside. Three Indian men and two women also qualified for the Candidates tournament in April. Held in Toronto this year, the tournament – which accommodates only eight players in each category and is held to find a challenger to the world champion — saw 17-year-old Gukesh becoming the youngest player to qualify for the World Championship.
After Gukesh won the Candidates, the legendary Garry Kasparov had remarked: “The Indian earthquake in Toronto is the culmination of the shifting tectonic plates in the chess world… The children of Vishy Anand are on the loose.”
“You can have a lot of trophies but the Olympiad gold is special. It establishes your dominance as a team and as a country,” Indian team captain Srinath Narayanan told The Indian Express.
Source: The Indian Express