Guyana’s two-week sojourn at the 45th Chess Olympiad in Budapest ended a fortnight ago with mixed results.
Queen’s College student Aditi Narayan Joshi’s star shone the brightest of all among the Guyana contingent. She played a total of ten games competing on Board Two for the women and won or drew nine of them. She lost one game. It is a record for chess in Guyana.
Ever since the re-involvement of Guyana in the Olympiad in 2014 in Norway under the auspices of then president of the Guyana Chess Federation Irshad Mohammed, there has never been a result such as this. It is remarkable that Joshi only began playing chess last year and created such a stir internationally.
It was only in 2014 that Guyana began participating in the Women’s Chess Olympiad. In the old days we competed in the 1978 and 1980 Olympiads in Argentina and Malta respectively with a male contingent.
During the mid-1990s I taught chess briefly after school hours at Queen’s College. There was a female student who used to fix the chess sets making them ready for play in the original position. That student loved the ancient game so much that I gave her the responsibility of caring for the chess sets. She eventually wrote the SAT examination and placed third in the world. Joshi reminds me of that student with her love of chess, her humility, her quest to learn more, and her ambition to become a grandmaster.
In team tournaments, an individual can only go as far as the team goes. If the team fails, it will engage in the next round, a team that also failed. Olympiads are team efforts, not individual efforts. In this 2024 Olympiad we experienced a few disappointments which caused Guyana to stumble, even as Joshi was excelling on all fronts. If we intend to rise in chess, the team that is representing us has to do better. There were a few noticeable individual performances that should be applauded from Anthony Drayton, Loris Nathoo and Sachin Pitamber. But as a team we must find a way to rise higher in the world of chess. Chess is a profession by itself. Joshi has demonstrated what is within our capacity to do. We should not disappoint her for the 2026 Chess Olympiad.
