The Champion's Curse: Can India Defend the Open in Samarkand?

India arrive in Samarkand as the team to beat — and recent history says that is exactly why they will not win. The data points one way, the calendar points another, and the host nation is hungrier than anyone.

India team celebrating gold at the Budapest 2024 Olympiad, photo by Mark Livshitz

A note before we start: this article is an open compilation of public results from the Olympchess database, together with the 2026 tournament season. We are in prediction mode. We have the right to be wrong, and we probably will be in at least one place. That is the fun of it.

Three months from now, the strongest players on Earth will sit down in Samarkand for the Open section of the 46th Chess Olympiad. Rather than guess who wins, we went to the numbers. The OlympChess database holds every Open Olympiad since 1927, and the last three — Batumi 2018, Chennai 2022, and Budapest 2024 — give us the clearest recent picture. We then checked those trends against how the top players are actually performing in 2026.

What we found is a puzzle. The Open section behaves nothing like the Women's section, where one country has pulled clear of the field. In the Open, the trophy keeps changing hands. And there is one rule that has held for twenty years — a rule that points directly at the defending champion.

Here is what the data shows, where it points, and where it might be lying to us.

In this article:

• The trajectory table
• The rule nobody can break
• India: a generation in a hurry
• Uzbekistan: the host that already knows how to win
• The fallen and the vanished
• The United States: always close, gold only once
• Dark horses for Samarkand
• Our prediction
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources and further reading

The trajectory table

Eight teams tell most of the story of the last three Olympiads. Here is where each of them finished, going back to Tromsø 2014 so you can see the full shape of each climb or fall.

The five numbers are their final placings in 2014, 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2024:

• 🇮🇳 India — 3rd, 4th, 6th, 4th, 1st. A slow climb that ends in gold.
• 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan — 17th, 39th, 16th, 1st, 3rd. From the middle of the pack to champions in a single leap.
• 🇺🇸 United States — 14th, 1st, 2nd, 5th, 2nd. Always near the top, the title only once.
• 🇨🇳 China — 1st, 13th, 1st, did not play, 4th. Two golds, then a disappearance and a quiet return.
• 🇷🇸 Serbia — 16th, 38th, 52nd, 20th, 5th. The most improbable climb in the table.
• 🇦🇿 Azerbaijan — 5th, 12th, 15th, 7th, 8th. Reliably close, never quite breaking through.
• 🇵🇱 Poland — 15th, 7th, 4th, 9th, 22nd. A near-medal in 2018, then a slide.
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England — 28th, 9th, 5th, 14th, 20th. The same story: close in 2018, fading since.

China did not appear in Chennai 2022.

Read down each column and you see a tournament with no settled order. Five different countries have stood on the top step across these editions. The two most stable teams in the table — the United States and India — have spent most of the decade finishing near the podium without owning it. The two most dramatic lines belong to Uzbekistan, who climbed from 39th to first in six years, and Serbia, who climbed from 52nd to fifth.

Now look at the gold medals specifically. China won in 2014. The United States won in 2016. China won again in 2018. Uzbekistan won in 2022. India won in 2024. Five Olympiads, four different champions, and not one of them managed to win twice in a row.

That is not an accident. It is the rule.

The rule nobody can break

Here is the single most useful fact in this whole article: in the modern open era, no team defends the Open Olympiad title.

The database makes the point cleanly. Go back through every champion since Calvià 2004:

• 2004 Ukraine win — and finish off the podium in 2006.
• 2006 Armenia win — defend once in 2008 — then fall away in 2010.
• 2010 Ukraine win — gone from the top in 2012.
• 2012 Armenia win — gone in 2014.
• 2014 China win — gone in 2016.
• 2016 United States win — gone in 2018.
• 2018 China win — gone in 2022.
• 2022 Uzbekistan win — bronze in 2024.

In twenty years, the only team that even managed back-to-back golds was Armenia in 2006 and 2008. Before that, you have to go all the way back to Russia's long reign through the 1990s and early 2000s — and behind Russia, the Soviet Union, which won basically everything for decades. That world is gone. The Soviet machine no longer exists, and Russia has not played an Olympiad since 2018.

What replaced it is a sport with no single dominant team. The field is deeper than it has ever been. A champion peaks, every rival studies them for two years, and the next edition arrives with five teams capable of winning. Defending a title means being the best again in a field that has spent four years catching up — and almost nobody manages it.

Which brings us to a problem for the favourites. India won Budapest 2024, and they did not squeak through. They took 21 of a possible 22 match points, winning ten matches and drawing one, finishing four clear match points ahead of the entire field. It was one of the most complete Olympiad victories in living memory.

And the rule does not care. India arrive in Samarkand as defending champions, and for twenty years that has been the one thing a team cannot successfully be.

India: a generation in a hurry

To understand why India are favourites anyway, look at what happened on the top boards in Budapest.

The database stores a performance rating for each player — a number that says, in effect, "at what level did this person actually play here?" In Budapest 2024, two Indian players posted figures that barely look real:

• Gukesh Dommaraju: 9 points from 10 games, performance rating 3056. He came into the event rated 2764. He played nearly 300 points above his own level for two straight weeks.
• Arjun Erigaisi: 10 points from 11 games, performance rating 2968.

Two players, in the same team, at the same event, performing in the stratosphere. That is what a generational wave looks like when it crests.

And it had been building. Look at Erigaisi alone. In Chennai 2022 he was already the find of the tournament, posting a performance of 2767 as a young reserve-level player. Two years later he was a 2968 monster. Behind those two stand Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu and the veteran anchor Viswanathan Anand, who at Batumi 2018 was still India's top board with a 2799 performance. India's whole trajectory in the table — 3, 4, 6, 4, 1 — hides this generational handover. The 2018 team leaned on Anand. The 2024 team was carried by players who were children when Anand was world champion.

So why the question mark?

Because the 2026 season tells a colder story. As of the June 2026 FIDE list, India's highest-rated player is Erigaisi at world number eight. Praggnanandhaa and Gukesh — the reigning world champion — sit down at sixteenth and nineteenth. Gukesh, the man who performed at 3056 in Budapest, has been losing classical rating through 2026; in Norway Chess he was beaten in a classical game by Germany's Vincent Keymer. A performance rating is a snapshot of two brilliant weeks. A rating list is the slower, crueller average of a whole season. And right now the average is cooling.

India are favourites because their ceiling is the highest in the field. But a team of young stars who all peaked together can also dip together — and the data behind the headline is not as overwhelming as the 2024 result made it look.

Uzbekistan: the host that already knows how to win

If you want the hottest bet in Samarkand, it is the home team — and the database explains why better than any preview can.

Look at Uzbekistan's line in the table again: 17, 39, 16, 1, 3. For years they were a mid-table team that occasionally slipped badly. Then, in Chennai 2022, they won the whole thing — a young, almost unseeded squad beating the planet. In Budapest 2024 they backed it up with bronze. That is not a fluke. That is a team that arrived and stayed.

The engine of it is one player. Trace Nodirbek Abdusattorov's performance rating across the three editions in the database:

• Batumi 2018: performance 2553, playing as a 13-year-old.
• Chennai 2022: performance 2803, as the gold-medal team's leader.
• Budapest 2024: performance 2884.

That is a straight line upward, from prodigy to genuine world-class force, traced across three Olympiads. And he no longer carries the team alone. By the June 2026 rating list, Uzbekistan have two players in the world's top five: Javokhir Sindarov, who reached a career-high fourth and is now officially the highest-rated Uzbek player for the first time, and Abdusattorov just behind him. Both are rated above every single Indian player.

Add it up. Uzbekistan have a champion's experience, a rising second star who now outranks the entire Indian top board, a squad in its early twenties with room to grow, and home soil in a country where chess is a point of national pride. And — crucially — they are not defending a title. The rule that haunts India does not touch them.

This is the team the numbers like most.

The fallen and the vanished

Not every story in the table is a climb.

The largest absence is the one that does not appear at all. Russia finished third in Batumi 2018 and has not played an Olympiad since. Following FIDE's suspension of the Russian federation, a team that had won the event for most of the 1990s and 2000s simply vanished from the map. A whole generation of strong Russian players — some now competing under other flags — has been removed from the equation. The void they left is part of why the modern Open has no settled champion: the team that used to win everything is not in the room.

China tell a stranger story. They won gold in 2014, missed Chennai 2022 entirely during the pandemic-era disruptions, and returned in Budapest 2024 to finish a quiet fourth. The talent is still there — Wei Yi and others remain among the world's best — but the dominant unit that won two of the last six Olympiads has not reassembled at full strength. They are a sleeping contender, not a fallen one. Watch their line-up announcement closely.

And then the European teams that have slipped. Poland climbed to fourth in Batumi 2018, then fell to ninth and twenty-second. England, who medalled regularly in the 1980s, reached fifth in 2018 and then dropped to fourteenth and twentieth. Both remain capable of a strong week, but neither is trending toward a medal. The middle of the Olympiad table is brutally competitive now, and standing still means falling.

The United States: always close, gold only once

The United States deserve their own paragraph, because their line is the most frustrating in the table: 14, 1, 2, 5, 2.

They won Baku 2016 — that gold is real and recent. But in the three editions since, they have finished second, fifth, and second again, always in the conversation, almost never on the top step. Their roster reads like a list of the strongest players in the world. In Budapest 2024, Fabiano Caruana posted a 2777 performance and Levon Aronian an 8/10 at 2773. As of June 2026, Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura sit second and third on the entire rating list, just behind Magnus Carlsen.

So why only one gold in a decade? Because the Olympiad is not won by ratings. It is won across eleven rounds, with one bad afternoon on board three enough to cost a match, and a single drawn match enough to cost the title. The United States have the firepower of a champion and the results of a runner-up. They are the most reliable podium team in the field — and reliability, in this event, is not the same as winning.

If the young teams stumble, the Americans are right there. They almost always are.

Dark horses for Samarkand

Two teams are worth a small, brave bet.

Serbia. Read their line slowly: 16, 38, 52, 20, 5. From 52nd in Batumi 2018 to fifth in Budapest 2024 is the most improbable climb in the table, and it is built on a generation of strong young players maturing at once. Fifth is a podium near-miss. The trend says they are not done climbing.

Azerbaijan. Steadier than Serbia and quietly dangerous: 5, 12, 15, 7, 8. Always in the top ten or close to it, never quite breaking through. They are a regional neighbour of the host, they travel well, and a team that consistently finishes seventh or eighth only needs one excellent week to land a medal.

Neither is a favourite. But the rule of the modern Open is that the favourite usually loses — and when the favourite loses, somebody from exactly this group steps up.

Our prediction

So we put it all together: three Olympiads of trajectories, twenty years of the no-defence rule, and the 2026 form guide. Here is where we land. Remember — prediction mode. We expect to be wrong somewhere.

Gold: Uzbekistan. They have the form, the two top-five players, the rising squad, and home soil — and unlike India, they are not fighting the rule that defending champions never win. This is the bet the data likes most.

Silver: India. The highest ceiling in the field, the reigning champions, a generation that can produce another 3056 out of nowhere. But the rule, the cooling 2026 ratings, and the weight of defending push them, narrowly, to second.

Bronze: United States. The most reliable podium team of the decade. If either young team wobbles, the Americans take gold. If neither does, they collect another medal that is not the one they want.

Outside the medals, watching closely: China, if they bring a full-strength squad, and Serbia, if their climb has one more step in it.

If you want the safe answer, pick India — they are the defending champions and the favourites, and favourites do win sometimes. But the more interesting answer, the one the database keeps pointing at, is the host nation. Uzbekistan have spent four years proving that Chennai 2022 was not luck. Samarkand is where they get to prove it at home.

Three months to go. Then the board decides.

Frequently asked questions

Who is the favourite to win the Open section at the 2026 Chess Olympiad in Samarkand?

India enter as defending champions and have the highest-rated peak performances in the field, which makes them the bookmakers' favourites. However, recent history strongly favours the host nation Uzbekistan: no team has defended the Open title in twenty years, and Uzbekistan's two top-five players outrank the entire Indian line-up on the June 2026 rating list.

When is the 46th Chess Olympiad in Samarkand?

The 46th Chess Olympiad is scheduled for September 2026 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It is the first Chess Olympiad held in Central Asia.

Has any team ever defended the Open Olympiad gold medal recently?

Not in the modern open era. The last team to win back-to-back Open golds was Armenia, in 2006 and 2008. Since then, eight different defences have failed in a row. Before Armenia, Russia's long run through the 1990s and early 2000s was the last sustained dynasty.

Why isn't Russia in the prediction?

Russia has not competed at a Chess Olympiad since Batumi 2018, following FIDE's suspension of the Russian federation. A team that dominated the event for decades is currently absent from the competition.

Could the United States win gold?

Yes. The United States have the second- and third-ranked players in the world as of June 2026 and finished second at the last Olympiad. Their challenge is consistency across eleven rounds, not raw strength — they have only won one Open gold in the past decade, at Baku 2016.

Sources and further reading

• Team and individual results: the Olympchess database.
• Current form and rankings: FIDE June 2026 rating list (fide.com) and contemporary chess news coverage of the 2026 season.
• For the full chronicle of every Chess Olympiad, see Krzysztof Puszczewicz's Great Book of Chess Olympiads series.

Follow the Samarkand 2026 chronicle on the 46th Olympiad Hub.