CHENNAI: A day before one of the knockout ties, Viswanathan Anand had a problem to solve.
In the world of online chess, electricity is the most important currency, something Anand realised his apartment wouldn’t have because of scheduled maintenance for eight hours from 9.00 am.
He wanted to avoid the scenario of playing exactly when power would be restored at 5.00 pm because he would lose valuable time reconnecting back to the server.
So the Indian team’s vice-captain, Srinath Narayanan, called up TNEB to sort out the issue. Anand’s apartment alone got back power at 2.00 pm.
In Hyderabad, the Area Engineer and the linesman placed themselves outside Koneru Humpy’s residence to ensure she always had power during India’s games.
It’s these little details that helped India win their first ever Chess Olympiad, an event that’s been there for 96 years. When Anand and Humpy were narrating these stories during a Zoom press conference on Monday, the smiles on their faces told their own story.
They have enough medals to run a pawn shop on their own but Anand said: “(...) very happy to put this in my trophy cabinet.”
The whole team, including the reserves who were on the call, should be because this is a triumph like no other. This was completely planned and executed from different parts of the world. For example, P Harikrishna was logging in from Poland everyday.
It was also a victory forged by burning the midnight oil, computing for possible mistakes and playing n no of training matches before the matches.
“We played a lot of training matches before the tournament,” captain Vidit Gujrathi said.
“In that aspect, we were extremely prepared.” All those matches also helped the likes of Humpy who, at the beginning of the Olympiad, did not really fancy herself as a player in the virtual world. “I didn’t really believe that I could do this (online). I had a lot of fear. But I got more and more comfortable
as the tournament progressed.”
Just as well because she exhibited nerves of steel during the Armageddon match — a sudden death shootout — against Poland in the semifinal.
Most of India’s players kept coming back to that match in the press conference. “Without her, we wouldn’t be happy,” Gujrathi said. It also helped Humpy that she won her world rapid title through this format in the final.
The team also learned from their earlier mistake of banking on the internet when an outage meant they were held to a 3-3 draw by Mongolia.
“We had a meeting after that, upgraded all our internet connections and that really helped us,” Gujrathi added.
The team’s camaraderie was also an unspoken factor in the win. At the beginning of the conference, all the players took turns to congratulate the other.
“These are the moments you live for,” Dronavalli Harika explained. Gujrathi went a step further. He compared this to the time when India won the cricket World Cup in 1983. For the latter, like many others, it was the realisation of a long-standing item in the bucket list.
“Not many people know this but I would go to every closing ceremony of the Olympiad before and I would get emotional. We would be close to the podium but not there.”
On Sunday, she got emotional because the team occupied the top step on the podium. “There is no podium but this is going to a very memorable moment for me,” she said.
It almost did not happen because of a bug involving CenturyLink during the final against Russia. The outage had disrupted internet connections for many Amazon, Hulu, PlayStation users on Sunday night.
It also caused disruptions for Divya Deshmukh and Nihal Sarin, who ‘lost’ their games because of that.
Thus, FIDE had originally awarded the tournament to Russia before they reviewed that decision. After announcing joint winners, it predictably attracted brickbats from Russia.
Former world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk, playing for Russia, tweeted: “Let’s clarify one thing: India didn’t win the Olympiad, but was rather named by Fide a co-champion,” she tweeted.
“Imho, there is a huge difference between actually ‘winning’ the gold or just being awarded one without winning a single game in the final.”
Anand dismissed those suggestions. “We were ready to play two more games, we were ready to play six more games. I think our win was deserved.”
Few will argue with him.