Uzbekistan’s love for chess rivals India’s own and revenge is on the menu for what happened in Budapest

The scenes were reminiscent of the way Gukesh was greeted by kids from his school at Chennai airport when he had won the Candidates tournament in Toronto in 2024.

Just like India, in Uzbekistan chess is a big deal. And chess players are no less than celebrities.

Sample this: when Sindarov won the FIDE World Cup in Goa in November, the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, stopped his speech mid-way during the opening ceremony of the Presidential Olympics to announce to a stadium full of people that Sindarov had emerged triumphant. This led to a rapture of applause from those in attendance at what was a grassroots extravaganza to boost Olympic sports. Shortly after getting off the stage after his speech, Mirziyoyev was on a video call with Sindarov to personally wish him on the title.

The celebrations did not end there. If the president of the chess-mad country was name dropping him in speeches and video-calling him, the prime minister of Uzbekistan was not to be left far behind. When Sindarov returned home, Uzbekistan’s Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov was among those who turned up at the airport to welcome the prodigy.

The welcoming party at Tashkent International Airport was even bigger than the current one to celebrate the Wijk aan Zee success. There were countless representatives of sports organizations standing shoulder to shoulder with women wearing colourful traditional attire, boys waving Uzbek flags and a military marching band.

For his victory in Goa, Sindarov was bestowed with a three-room apartment, cash prize worth reportedly $10,000 and the state title of ‘Honored Athlete of the Republic of Uzbekistan’.

This was not without precedent.

When the Uzbek team, comprising Sindarov and Abdusattorov, had upset the Indian team with Gukesh and Pragg in it to clinch the gold medal at the Olympiad in 2022 in Chennai, there were reports that the team members were also given two-room apartments and Chevrolet Equinox SUVs. Abdusattorov too was given an apartment for winning the World Rapid Championship in 2021.

The country’s top sport is football and the Uzbeks love a host of combat sports like boxing and wrestling and the indigenous kurash, but chess is starting to dominate headlines, thanks to the regular exploits of its own golden generation of prodigies who are coming of age.

“While each player in our national team has his own sponsor— like I have my own private sponsor — the government does a good job supporting everything from training camps to travel and expenses. The government is doing absolutely everything for us,” Abdusattorov had told The Indian Express in an interview in 2024. “We had a great Olympics in Paris. We had five gold medals in boxing. So, boxing, I would say, is the most popular in Uzbekistan. Ranked first. It’s changing, but I think chess is in the top three. In a sense, we are one of the most improved sports in Uzbekistan.”

The parallels with the Indian chess boom are unmistakable. Just like India had a trailblazer in the form of Viswanathan Anand, Uzbekistan had Rustam Kasimdzhanov. Just like Anand had shaped the destinies of many of India’s current golden generation, Kasimdzhanov has helped many Uzbek stars as the head coach of the men’s national chess team of Uzbekistan.

And just like with India, government support, coupled with private sponsors, has ensured that players need only to focus on chess.

If India has a rich history with the sport (chess originated as chaturanga in India), Uzbekistan’s tryst with the sport also goes far into the pages of history books. In fact, chess pieces of the Kushan period (I-II centuries) were discovered during archaeological excavations in Dalvarzintepa in 1972. Five years later, during a study in Samarkand, seven chess pieces of the VII-VIII centuries were discovered.

At the Olympiad in Uzbekistan later this year, the Uzbek quartet of Sindarov, Abdusattorov, Nodirbek Yakubboev, and Jakhongir Vakhidov will be gunning for the Olympiad gold they lost to India in the 2024 edition.

“We are definitely looking forward to having a kind of revenge for Budapest,” Abdusattorov had told Express in 2024. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how we compete with each other over the years because we are definitely going to be one of the favorites in each Olympiad for coming years. It’s obviously very hard to compete with Indians because they have a very deep reserve in their team. Every Indian player can have a replacement. But I can’t say this about my team because we are kind of limited in that sense. We have four established super grandmasters. But we will do our best when we host the 2026 Chess Olympiad in our country.”

Two years since this comment from Abdusattorov, the world has started to see what their best looks like.