The first Olympiad

Everyone remembers their first Olympiad. As I boarded the flight to Chennai last month, it struck me that two full decades have passed since my Olympiad debut in Bled, 2002. Respectable in the seniority stakes, though one of the charms of this biennial team event is that you can count on meeting someone excited to reminisce about Dubai 1986, or perhaps Lugano 1968, and who hasn’t missed one since.

This year, teams from around 200 nations – perhaps 2,000 players in all – made the trip to India. The event was moved from Moscow with just a few months’ notice, but any fears about the hasty organisation were quickly allayed. The country’s abundant respect for chess was evident at every level, from the volunteers who met us warmly at the airport, to the presence of Narendra Modi at the opening ceremony.

If international chess can be said to have an oral tradition, then the Olympiad is its most important conduit. The two-week-long event is a generational and cultural melting pot, as retired grandmasters pass on their war stories and hard-won wisdom as captains and coaches. Meanwhile, each edition seems to thrust a number of brilliant young players into the spotlight. (Last week I wrote about the outstanding performance of India’s second team, comprised mostly of teenagers).

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This year, England’s strongest individual performance came from David Howell, who was awarded a gold medal for his performance on board 3. Unfortunately, our final-round defeat to a dangerous team from Moldova knocked us back in the standings. (A variation from my own rather painful game appears in this weeks edition.)

Ireland’s second board, Conor Murphy, scored a notable success in Chennai. The Cambridge mathematics graduate lost his final game and narrowly missed out on an individual medal, but his result easily earned him his second grandmaster norm – a major step towards being awarded the title.