"At the Olympiad Gukesh made a conscious decision that he will just have fun like a normal 20-year-old" — Indian Team Captain Srinath Narayanan

Srinath Narayanan

Indian team captain

“Around August, after he played the Chennai Grand Masters, I started seeing a change in Gukesh. He was learning surfing, doing a bit of skating, trying all these new things. He was spending some time away from chess trying to have fun.

The same thing carried over to the 2026 Olympiad as well. He was having a lot of fun. When we had our online training camp for the Olympiad, as soon as Gukesh joined, the vibe got lighter.

There’s been an incredible difference with Gukesh every year. In 2022, when I was not captain of the team Gukesh was in, India 2, the story I heard was that Gukesh wouldn’t participate in team meetings. He would just turn up to play and win his individual games.

In 2023 during the Asian Games, the players were not the best of friends. But before the Budapest Olympiad, I had a chat with the players. I felt something changed in Gukesh internally, that he really wanted to get along with the team and spend time with everyone, indulge in banter, attend team meetings, which became a ritual starting from the Budapest Olympiad.

At the 2024 Budapest Olympics, the team meetings for initial rounds were just 5-10 minutes. By the time we played USA in round 10, meetings would just go for 40-45 minutes with a lot of casual banter.

[Note: That evening, Gukesh and Vidit turned up at the Bermuda Party and Gukesh did another thing you would not expect him to do in the middle of a tournament. He danced. He even did an impression of Michael Jackson’s moon walk.]

With the number of cameras and attention on him, it was difficult for Gukesh to be able to do that in the past. But in Samarkand, he made a conscious decision that he is not going to care about all those things and he will just have fun like a normal 20-year-old.”