India Won Both Golds at the 2024 Chess Olympiad. Nobody Else Has Ever Done That.

At the 45th Chess Olympiad in Budapest, September 2024, India won the gold medal in the open section and the gold medal in the women’s section. On the same day. In the same building. A double gold that no country had ever achieved before in the 94-year history of the event.

It wasn’t close in the open section. India finished with 21 out of 22 possible match points, four points ahead of the silver medalists. Their five players (Gukesh Dommaraju, R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Vidit Gujrathi, and Pentala Harikrishna) were ranked against teams from 185 nations across eleven rounds of team competition.

The numbers that made India’s win decisive

Gukesh scored 9 points from 10 games on Board 1, a tournament performance rating of 3056. That number is almost certainly impossible to maintain over a longer sample. No player in history has a classical tournament performance above 3000 against a full field of top-level opposition for an extended event. But across ten games at the Olympiad, with Gukesh at 17, that’s what the score sheet said.

Arjun Erigaisi was similarly dominant on Board 2. Both won individual gold medals.

The team’s overall statistics were stark: 50 wins, 26 draws, 12 losses across 88 individual games. The losses came when other players absorbed difficult assignments to give India’s top boards favorable pairings. That’s how team chess is supposed to work.

The United States finished second. Their open team included Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Leinier Dominguez, Levon Aronian, and Ray Robson: average rating 2758, top-seeded. Hikaru Nakamura didn’t make the trip. Even without him, the US fielded arguably the strongest lineup they’d ever brought to an Olympiad. They finished 4 match points behind India.

Uzbekistan claimed bronze.

The women’s section was just as convincing

India’s women’s team (Vaishali Rameshbabu, Koneru Humpy, Harika Dronavalli, Divya Deshmukh, and Vantika Agrawal) won gold in their section simultaneously. All five players won individual medals.

Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal took individual gold medals. Harika Dronavalli took silver. The depth across all five boards was what made the result hold up under the pressure of the final round.

For reference: the Soviet Union dominated Chess Olympiads for decades. Their women’s team won gold in 11 of the 14 Olympiads held while the USSR existed. India winning gold in both sections in 2024 is the kind of result that gets put next to that history.

What India’s dominance actually means

The obvious starting point is Viswanathan Anand. India’s first grandmaster (1988) and five-time world champion built a national chess culture that produced Gukesh, Pragg, and Arjun. Anand ran the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy, mentored younger players directly, and his influence on the development ecosystem is impossible to overstate.

But infrastructure alone doesn’t produce a Gukesh at 17 with a 3056 TPR. That comes from training quality, competitive volume (Indian players play more rated games per year than almost any cohort in the world), and the specific combination of coaching and ambition that’s hard to architect from above.

The more practical explanation is that a critical mass formed. Once Pragg was reaching World Cup finals against Carlsen (2023) and Gukesh was winning the Candidates, younger Indian players had live proof that the title was achievable. That changes how you train.

Why the Chess Olympiad matters

Some chess events are glamorous; the Olympiad is foundational. Every significant chess nation participates. The team format rewards consistency across all five boards rather than individual brilliance on one. And it’s the one event where national pride is actually built into the structure, players aren’t competing for prize money, they’re competing for their country.

India winning both golds is the chess equivalent of a small country sweeping the relay races at the Olympics. The result has lasting structural meaning: India is now the chess superpower, not an emerging one.

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Also see: Gukesh’s world title win, which came three months after Budapest. The 2024 Chess Olympiad was the last major event before he became champion.

Frequently asked questions

Who won the 2024 Chess Olympiad open section? India, with 21/22 match points: four clear of the United States in second. It was India’s first gold medal in the open section. Gukesh Dommaraju scored 9/10 on Board 1 with a 3056 performance rating.

Has any country ever won both the open and women’s Olympiad gold simultaneously? No. India in 2024 is the first. The record held even accounting for the Soviet Union’s dominance of the women’s section across the 1950s–90s.

Did Magnus Carlsen play in the 2024 Chess Olympiad? No. Norway participated but without Carlsen, who wasn’t in the team lineup. Carlsen has generally not prioritized team events in recent years.

What was Gukesh’s performance rating at the 2024 Olympiad? 3056, scored across 10 games on Board 1. Among the highest tournament performance ratings ever recorded at the Olympiad level for a Board 1 player.

Sources

• Open event at the 45th Chess Olympiad, Wikipedia
• Double gold for India at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest, ChessBase
• India Win It All: 14 Things We Learned, Chess.com
• Silman, Jeremy. Silman’s Complete Endgame Course. Siles Press, 2007.

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