America's Samarkand squad and the ghost of a golden age

When the United States named its team for the 46th Chess Olympiad in late June, the headline wasn't who made the list. It was who didn't. Leinier Dominguez, higher-rated than two of the players selected ahead of him, stayed home. In his place: two Olympiad debutants, one of them the most talked-about American player of the decade. It is a bet on form and activity over raw rating — and it is not the first time the United States has made it. The last time was ninety years ago, and it produced the most dominant run in American Olympiad history.

US Chess Team, Photo by Maria Emelianova/FIDE

The 2026 bet

The US open squad for Samarkand is Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Hans Niemann, Levon Aronian, and Awonder Liang, captained by John Donaldson with Grigory Oparin as trainer. Three of them — Caruana, So, Aronian — return from Budapest 2024, where the United States took silver. Two are new to the event: Niemann and Liang, both born in 2003, both making their Olympiad debuts.

The selection carries a clear signal. The most striking absence is Hikaru Nakamura, the highest-rated American on the July 2026 FIDE list at 2792 — world number three, and rated above Caruana. A US team with Nakamura on board one would, on paper, be materially stronger. But his absence is not a selection call: Nakamura has not played an Olympiad since 2018, and did not this time either. Across seven Olympiad appearances (2006–2018) he won team gold at Baku 2016 and two team bronzes; since then he has stepped back from the event entirely. The world number three sitting out, by his own choice, is the backdrop against which the rest of the selection was made. More pointedly, Leinier Dominguez — a fixture of the American team since his 2018 federation transfer — was left out despite outrating both players chosen ahead of him. On the July 2026 FIDE list, Dominguez stood at 2732 — higher than Aronian (2724), higher than Liang (2696), and even a shade above debutant Niemann (2730), who was picked ahead of him. The reason offered in the chess press was activity: Dominguez played only a handful of classical games across 2025, while Niemann and Liang spent the season competing hard, including a twelve-game head-to-head match in Paris that Niemann won.

So the principle is legible. When rating and recent classical activity point in different directions, the United States chose activity. A federation that could have fielded a more decorated, higher-rated lineup instead picked the players who had been in the arena.

That principle has a history. To see it, you have to go back to a period when the United States didn't just contend at the Olympiad — it owned it.

The historical mirror: four golds in a row

Between 1931 and 1937, the United States won the Chess Olympiad four consecutive times: Prague 1931, Folkestone 1933, Warsaw 1935, and Stockholm 1937. In the records of the pre-war Olympiads, no other nation matches that streak in the period. The American team of the 1930s was, simply, the team to beat.

What's striking, looking at the rosters, is how they were built. These were not lineups of grizzled veterans. They were mixtures — a young, ascendant core anchored by one or two much older figures, with the youth doing an enormous share of the scoring.

Prague 1931. Standing from left: Marshall, Dake, NN, Kashdan, Fuchs, Horowitz and H. Steiner

Source: The 4th Chess Olympiad – Prague 1931, Krzysztof Puszczewicz

Consider the personnel across the four golds:

• Prague 1931 (first gold): Isaac Kashdan on board one, aged around 26; Arthur Dake, 21, on board three; Israel Horowitz, 24, on board four. The anchor: Frank Marshall, then 54, on board two.
• Folkestone 1933 (second gold): Reuben Fine, just 19, scored 9/13 on board three; Dake, 23, went 10/13 on board four; the reserve, Albert Simonson, was also 19. Marshall, now 56, held board two.
• Warsaw 1935 (third gold): Dake, 25, posted a spectacular 15½/18 — over 86% — on board four. Fine, 21, led on board one. Marshall, 58, still played.
• Stockholm 1937 (fourth gold): Samuel Reshevsky, 26, took board one; Fine, 23, scored 11½/15 on board two; Kashdan, 32, went 14/16 — 87.5% — on board three. Marshall, now 60, closed out the boards.

The pattern is unmistakable. The engine of the dynasty was young — Fine and Dake in their late teens and early twenties, carrying huge scores on the lower boards — while Marshall, two generations older, sat as the fixed point the team was built around. Four golds, and the same structural idea underneath each: young scorers plus an old anchor.

The parallel

Set the two eras side by side and the resemblance is not thematic hand-waving. It is structural.

Both American teams are built on the same shape: a veteran anchor plus a young core that has to deliver the points. In the 1930s, Marshall — 54 to 60 across the run — was the immovable senior presence, while Fine and Dake, barely out of their teens, produced the decisive results. In 2026, Aronian, 44 at the time of the Olympiad, is the senior figure returning for a third consecutive US Olympiad, while the two debutants, Niemann and Liang, both 23 by September, are the youth being asked to convert.

Both selections also privilege the same thing: who is playing, not who ranks highest on paper. The 1930s American teams were assembled from the players actually active and winning on the tournament circuit of the day — a circuit with no Elo system to arbitrate, where recent results were the only currency. The 2026 team applies the modern version of exactly that logic: Dominguez's rating was higher, but Niemann's and Liang's classical activity was the deciding factor. In both cases, the federation trusted form over reputation.

And in both cases, the youth being backed were not untested juniors but proven competitors. Fine at 19 was already one of the strongest players in the world; within a few years he would be a genuine world-championship contender. Dake was a match-hardened professional. Niemann, ranked inside the world's top 20 through much of 2026, and Liang, who touched a career-high rating and the top 25 that same year, arrive in Samarkand as established grandmasters, not experiments. The bet in 1933 and the bet in 2026 are the same bet: back the players who are winning now, and trust that youth plus activity beats age plus résumé.

Where the echo breaks down

An honest echo names its own limits, and this one has real ones.

The most important: the 1930s "youth" was not entirely a choice. American chess then was amateur and thinly funded, with no professional infrastructure and no rating list to force selection debates. Teams were built from whoever could travel and was winning — youth was as much a product of circumstance as of strategy. The 2026 selection, by contrast, is a deliberate call made against a clear alternative, with a higher-rated veteran available and passed over. One era backed youth because it had to; the other because it decided to. That is not a small distinction.

The competitive context is also incomparable. The United States won four straight in the 1930s partly because the field was smaller and the Soviet Union — about to dominate the game for half a century — was not yet competing. No one should read the 1930s dynasty as evidence that the 2026 team will medal, let alone win. Samarkand's field is the deepest in Olympiad history, with roughly 200 teams and at least three genuine gold contenders ahead of or alongside the United States.

And the drought between the two eras is the loudest fact of all. After Stockholm 1937, the United States did not win Olympiad gold again for a very long time — its next open gold came only in 2016, in Baku, nearly eight decades later. Whatever the 1930s proved, it did not prove permanence.

What it means

The official website for 46th Chess Olympiad - https://chessolympiad2026.fide.com/

The value of the echo isn't prediction. It's perspective. The 2026 selection was read by some as risky — leaving a higher-rated player at home, handing Olympiad debuts to two players in a must-perform event. The history says that structure — a veteran anchor, a young core, form over rating — is not a novelty for American chess. It is the exact shape of the most successful team the United States ever sent to an Olympiad.

That doesn't guarantee anything. History rhymes; it doesn't repeat. The 1930s squad had a weaker field, an amateur's freedom to pick on form, and no Soviet machine across the board. The 2026 squad has none of those advantages. But it does have the same underlying wager, and it is worth remembering that the last time the United States built a team this way, the bet paid off four times running.

Whether Samarkand adds a fifth is a question the boards will answer. What's already clear is that the instinct behind the American team — trust the players who are winning now — is older than Elo, older than the Soviet era, and older than every player on the current roster. It goes back to a young Reuben Fine, 19 years old, scoring nine points on board three while a 56-year-old Frank Marshall held the fort beside him.

Sources

Historical Olympiad data — team results, rosters, individual scores, boards and player ages for the 1928–1964 American teams — is drawn from the olympchess.com Olympiad database (the Great Book of Chess Olympiads dataset), covering every Olympiad through Tel Aviv 1964.

Contemporary facts on the 2026 US squad: US Chess Federation, "2026 Olympiad Teams Announced" (June 2026); ChessBase, "US Olympiad teams: Niemann and Liang to make debuts in open squad" (26 June 2026); ChessBase, "FIDE ratings – July 2026." Player ratings (Nakamura 2792, Dominguez 2732, Niemann 2730, Aronian 2724, Liang 2696) are from the FIDE classical rating list of 1 July 2026. Nakamura's Olympiad record (seven appearances 2006–2018, team gold Baku 2016, two bronzes) is a matter of record. Baku 2016 gold and Budapest 2024 silver are established results of record.

For the full chronicle of the American golden age — Prague 1931, Folkestone 1933, Warsaw 1935 and Stockholm 1937 — see the relevant volumes of Krzysztof Puszczewicz's Great Book of Chess Olympiads series.