Chess Olympiad compensated for the lack of gold in Paris Olympics to a great extent: Abhijeet Kunte

New Delhi, October 23 (IANS). India did not win a single gold in Paris Olympics 2024. But the men's and women's chess teams representing India at the Chess Olympiad 2024 in Budapest achieved a historic feat by winning gold medals in both the categories. The entire country rejoiced with joy at this victory.

According to women's team coach Abhijeet Kunte, their success has compensated for the defeat in the Olympics.

He told IANS, “I told the team that we will not repeat the mistakes of 2022, we will not come under pressure and will create a new history by winning the double gold. This gold medal was very important for the country. We had not won a single gold in the Olympics. And even though there wasn't much hype about us in the tournament, we made up for it in the Olympics. I think that would have made a lot of Indians very happy.”

D.Gukesh, R. The young Indian team of Praggnananda, Arjun Erigaysi, Vidit Gujarati and P. Harikrishna performed brilliantly and won India's first title in the Olympiad by remaining undefeated in 11 rounds in the open category.

In the women's category, the Indian team comprising of D. Harika, R. Vaishali, Divya Deshmukh, Tania Sachdev and Vantika Agarwal made a strong comeback after losing to Poland in the eighth round and won the title with a victory over Azerbaijan in the final round.

Vantika, who was present with her coach at the NDTV World Summit 2024, also talked about her personal experience of being a double medalist.

“Winning two gold medals was a very proud moment, the men's and women's team won gold medals after 100 years. We were so happy that when we won the match against Azerbaijan we immediately started celebrating,” Vantika told IANS. We did a special dance with Tania and Gukesh celebrating like Rohit Sharma and Messi, when we came back and he talked to us, it was very special for us.

–IANS

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