India's defending champions arrived in Samarkand ready to protect their double gold from Budapest. Instead, their first hours in Uzbekistan were spent waiting at the airport with nowhere to sleep.
The 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad is set to open in Samarkand on September 15, 2026, with the first competitive round beginning September 16. But before a single game could be played, the Indian contingent found itself dealing with a logistical mess that had little to do with chess.
What actually happened
The Indian Open and Women's teams flew into Samarkand on Monday, September 14. According to GM Srinath Narayanan, the non-playing captain of India's Open team, the squad landed at the airport and then waited roughly five hours without being told which rooms they had been allotted, or when that would happen.
Narayanan posted about the situation directly on social media, writing that the team was having a terrible experience at the Olympiad and that there was no clarity on when rooms would finally be assigned. Vidit Gujrathi, one of the five players on India's Open team, also spoke about the ongoing delay, confirming the team was still waiting for their rooms in Uzbekistan.
India wasn't the only team affected
The frustration wasn't limited to the Indian camp. Austrian grandmaster Felix Blohberger replied to Narayanan's post describing a similar experience, saying his team had arrived at 6 a.m. the previous day and that even their captain didn't get a room until around 1:30 p.m. That detail suggests the delays weren't specific to India, but part of a broader arrangement issue affecting multiple federations arriving in Samarkand for the tournament.
Why this matters for India's title defense
The timing makes this more than just travel inconvenience. India arrives in Samarkand as the reigning Olympiad champion in both the Open and Women's sections, having swept both golds at the 2024 Olympiad in Budapest, a feat that hadn't been achieved by any single nation since China managed it back in 2018.
The Open squad features reigning World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju alongside Arjun Erigaisi, Praggnanandhaa R, Nihal Sarin and Vidit Gujrathi, with Narayanan continuing as captain. The Women's team consists of Koneru Humpy, Divya Deshmukh, Vaishali Rameshbabu, Vantika Agrawal and Savitha Shri B. Both squads are walking into an event with a record field of roughly 400 teams, 208 in the Open section and 192 in the Women's, and a demanding eleven round Swiss format that leaves very little room for players to recover from a rough start.
Long delays and uncertainty right before an event of this intensity are far from ideal preparation, particularly for players who rely on rest and routine heading into the opening rounds. Whether the disruption ends up affecting India's results once the games begin remains to be seen.
The bigger picture
This is the first time the Chess Olympiad has been held in Central Asia, and with the field bigger than ever before, the logistical demands on the host city and organizers are considerable. Issues of this kind, while frustrating for the players directly affected, aren't unheard of at large-scale team events hosting thousands of participants across dozens of federations at once.
As of this report, there has been no official statement from FIDE addressing the accommodation delays, and it isn't yet clear whether the issue was isolated to a handful of federations or was a wider arrangement problem across the venue's partner hotels. We'll update this story as more information becomes available.
What's next
The opening ceremony for the 2026 Chess Olympiad takes place on September 15, with the first round of games beginning September 16 at the Silk Road International Exhibition Centre. The tournament runs through September 27, when both the Open and Women's champions will be crowned. For India, the hope will be that Tuesday's chaos stays firmly off the board once the games actually begin.
