Editorial: This article reflects the views of the ChessNewsDaily editorial board.
India's players arrived in Samarkand as defending Olympiad champions. They spent more than five hours waiting for hotel rooms that had apparently never been properly booked. Captain Srinath Narayanan called it a "terrible experience." Grandmaster Vidit Gujrathi said his first impressions were "very poor." FIDE responded with a statement of deep regret and a promise to reimburse teams who had paid for alternative accommodation themselves.
The accommodation failure was not even the most serious problem of the opening days. Two players from Namibia were denied visas on arrival in Uzbekistan, with one reportedly left stranded in Istanbul without his passport. Namibia registered its coach and federation president as emergency replacements, which is another way of saying the team was eliminated before the event began. FIDE also acknowledged that delegates to its own Congress — including at least one Council member — did not receive visas to attend and vote, a complication with direct implications for the governance process that was meant to take place alongside the competition.
This Has Happened Before
Budapest 2024 produced the same categories of failure. Scotland, Monaco, Germany, England, Croatia and Bulgaria all reported accommodation problems. Forty teams across the open and women's sections were listed as unpaired on the opening day because players reportedly could not reach the venue in time. African federations suffered most acutely from visa rejections, with delegations from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lesotho, Gambia and others reportedly turned away. A source inside FIDE told Chessdom that up to sixty federations were experiencing visa difficulties, and acknowledged that the scale was "substantially more" than usual.
Two consecutive Olympiads, the same categories of failure. Visas, accommodation, coordination between FIDE and local organisers. These are not obscure administrative details — they are the basic minimum required to run an international event. And the Olympiad is not a peripheral fixture. It is the one occasion every two years when the entire chess world assembles under FIDE's direct administration.
The Credibility Problem Is Not Only Operational
The operational record sits alongside a serious credibility problem for FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich personally. In February 2025, world number one Magnus Carlsen publicly demanded his resignation, citing alleged "coercion of players, misuse of power and broken promises" arising from the Freestyle Chess dispute. Carlsen published WhatsApp messages in which Dvorkovich had allegedly written that players would "NOT be affected in any way" by the dispute, and that he would step down if his word were undermined by the FIDE Council. Carlsen's public response was direct: "He said if I'm not getting the council's approval I'm going to resign — so where is the resignation?" Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour head Jan Henric Buettner echoed the call, stating that Dvorkovich had allegedly "proven for the third time within two months that you cannot even speak for FIDE."
A separate episode concerns the treatment of Czech grandmaster David Navara, who faced sustained public harassment from Vladimir Kramnik while FIDE remained silent. In an open letter published in May 2025, Navara wrote that Dvorkovich "was among the recipients of most of my messages on the topic, including the ignored calls for help," and that "the actions of FIDE (or lack thereof) caused me a lot of suffering." The letter ended with a public demand for the president's resignation. The Czech Chess Federation backed Navara publicly. Levon Aronian and Judit Polgar also reacted. A federation president who allegedly does not answer a distressed player's direct appeals for help has failed at something more fundamental than logistics.
A Structural Problem, Not a Series of Accidents
Taken individually, each incident has a plausible local explanation. A hotel overbooked. A consulate refused. A message went unanswered. What is harder to explain away is the pattern — the same failures, in the same categories, at the same flagship event, in consecutive cycles. FIDE's public responses have been consistent: expressions of regret, offers of reimbursement, a statement that lessons will be learned. Reimbursement covers a cost. It does not address whatever produces the cost repeatedly.
At some point, national federations and their players are entitled to ask what the baseline guarantee of participation in a FIDE event actually is. If the answer cannot be given with confidence, that is a governance problem rather than a logistical one.
What Federations Are Entitled to Expect
Chess has grown. Its player base has expanded, commercial interest has increased and public attention has broadened. That growth creates opportunity, but it also raises the standard that the sport's governing body needs to meet. Federations bring their players to the Olympiad on the understanding that basic conditions — accommodation, travel, visas, competition — have been properly arranged. Players who experience problems deserve a response from leadership, not silence. And the electoral process that runs alongside the Olympiad requires that delegates can actually attend.
The federations voting on FIDE's future direction in Samarkand are doing so in the middle of another Olympiad that has already produced familiar failures. They have better information than any outside observer about what the next four years should look like.
This editorial reflects the views of the editorial board and does not represent the position of any federation, candidate or campaign.