The Chess Olympiad is the largest and most important team event in the FIDE calendar. It involves serious organizational effort both on local and on international level. This effort is increasingly difficult, as the number of participants is growing. The Chess Olympiad 2024 in Budapest breaks the participation record. 2022 Chennai Olympiad held the participation record with 187 teams registered in Open competition and 162 teams registered in the Women’s competition, a record that was previously set in Batumi, 2018 with 182 teams representing 176 countries in Open and Women sections. Now Budapest Chess Olympiad 2024 will feature 193 teams in the Open section and 181 squads in the Women’s competition.
While the growing number of participants creates organizational load, the experience gained with each Olympiad is more also. Chennai was better than Batumi, Batumi was better than Baku, etc. But something in Budapest seems broken, the situation with a large number of delegations is serious.
In the past week Chessdom reported on multiple federations having accommodation trouble in the Chess Olympiad 2024. Read more: Monaco, Scotland and Germany break the news / Turkey reports problems / England on accommodation issues / Anish Giri critical of the situation / Croatia with accommodation problems and asked for 50 eur/meal / Bulgaria with accommodation trouble All these federations are from Europe, with substantial experience in event participation, with no lack of resources, and yet they had to go through major trouble to secure their stay at Budapest.
While those European federations were reporting accommodation issues, multiple other sources alerted us for even bigger trouble brewing. A source, which required anonymity due to their position in FIDE, summed up the situation for Chessdom, “Up to 60 countries are experiencing visa issues for the Chess Olympiad at the moment.” They added, “In every Olympiad there are visa problem, this time they are substantially more.”
The countries with visa issues are mainly, but not limited to, Africa and the Caribbean basin. The list ranges from Central African Republic to Saint Vincent and Grenadines, and from Fiji to Kenya.
The only light at the end of the tunnel is the managing director of FIDE Dana Reizniece-Ozola. In the past days she has been actively working to reduce the number of federations with problems.
Updates to follow
Photo: official letter of visa refusal of CAR
