The Samarkand Torch: When Chess Needs a Ceremony, and the Truth Needs a Fact-Checker

Autumn in Saint Petersburg, and the birches along the Neva are beginning to turn gold. I sit in the newsroom, my tea cooling, and on the screen is a photograph sent from Samarkand. A small torch is being passed from one hand to another. Around it there is no pitch, no roaring stand, no final whistle. Only hands, and a flame. I looked at that photograph longer than necessary, because it reminded me of something I learned after more than forty years of writing about sport: sometimes people hold a ceremony not to celebrate a victory, but to plant a belief in the future.

The Samarkand torch opens a larger story than itself. The Chess Olympiad 2026 will take place in Uzbekistan from September 15 to September 27, 2026. This is the first time the most prestigious team event in the chess world will set foot in Central Asia. The person receiving the torch at that ceremony was Javokhir Sindarov, a young Uzbek player. On the presenting side, according to the report released, was Viswanathan Anand – the Indian legend, five-time world champion, now holding a leadership role within the International Chess Federation (FIDE). The item also mentioned the role of the All India Chess Federation (AICF), and one impressive figure: India is the reigning champion in both sections, Open and Women's, following the Budapest Olympiad of 2026.

I recount these details not to narrate an event, but to place on the table a question my profession forces me to ask: what is really being handed over in this ceremony? A torch, or a story?

A torch is not a flame; it is a tool.

The chess Olympiad torch relay was initiated by FIDE in 2026, taking direct inspiration from the Olympic flame. This is a symbolic decision, but its logic is very clear. Chess is a sport without a physical live audience in the conventional sense – two players sit facing each other, the audience watches through screens or through analysis boards. There is no collision, no shouting, no sweat falling to the floor. A sport like that needs a ceremony to be sellable to the general public. The torch is that tool. It creates a moment that can be photographed, broadcast, and posted on social media in three short seconds.

I understand this. I understand it because I have witnessed how a sport tries to crawl out of its own scholarly cocoon. But I also understand something else, drawn from my own experience of watching matches: when a ceremony becomes the centrepiece, the real numbers tend to be pushed to the margins. And when numbers are pushed to the margins, errors find room to breed.

In the report about the Samarkand ceremony, there are three propositions that need verification. These three propositions are not minor details. They are the backbone of the entire story.

First, Javokhir Sindarov is called the "2026 Candidates winner".

This is a designation of particular weight. The Candidates Tournament is the qualifier that decides the challenger to the world champion. The winner of this event is not merely a strong player; they are the official candidate for the chess crown. Such an event would generate a global wave of coverage within the professional chess world. It would appear on every specialist site, every opening-analysis bulletin, every forum.

But here, that designation appears in a light ceremonial item, with no games attached, no scores, no opponents, no event context. A title of that magnitude, and yet not a single line of annotation. From my experience, when a large claim appears without data support, the most likely explanation is that it was copied from a press release or a secondary summary, never passing through professional verification.

It is possible that this designation is the result of a confusion. "Participating in the Candidates" and "winning the Candidates" are two entirely different things, but a non-specialist writer can easily swap them. It is also possible that Sindarov was mentioned in some Candidates cycle in another role, and the writer awarded him a medal he never earned. Whichever possibility holds, the conclusion is the same: this is a proposition that must be verified before citation, and it should absolutely not be spread further.

Second, Sindarov is called the "top Uzbek player".

Here I have to slow down a little, because my empathy for young players does not permit me to write carelessly. Javokhir Sindarov was born in 2026, and is one of the finest young players of his generation, with a classical Elo rating hovering around 2,690 to 2,710 in recent times. He fully deserves to be mentioned as a major talent of Central Asian chess. But "top Uzbek player" is a measurable designation, and according to the classical chess rankings I follow, the person holding that position is usually Nodirbek Abdusattorov – a former World Rapid Champion, who has repeatedly stood above Sindarov in long-form Elo.

What I want to say is not that Sindarov is weak. He is strong. What I want to say is this: a designation granted inaccurately can become a burden for the very person who receives it. When expectations are inflated, people no longer judge him by what he does, but by a peak he has never touched. And that is how a good story gets broken into a bad one over time.

I remember a summer night in 2026. That night, at Luzhniki, before seventy-nine thousand spectators, my Russia was pinned back by Spain, who held seventy-five percent of possession. Thirty-two-year-old goalkeeper Akinfeev played like a steel wall, saving Koke's and Iago Aspas's penalties in the shootout, and Russia won 4-3. I wrote: "Luzhniki night, the old bird understood that landing is also a way of flying." I recount this not to compare chess with football. I recount it because I learned that a correct designation is a gift for the deserving, while a distorted one is a debt the receiver must repay with their own career.

Third, Viswanathan Anand is called the "FIDE Interim President".

This is the third proposition, and also the one I am most certain needs revisiting. Anand is one of the greatest players of all time, a five-time world champion, and currently serves as FIDE Deputy President. The FIDE Presidency has for years been held by Arkady Dvorkovich. The phrase "interim" implies a temporary succession of power – a governance state that would itself be major news, worthy of a front page across every sports wire. For such a state to appear only in passing in a small ceremonial item, with no explanation whatsoever, is a very suspicious sign.

Perhaps the writer confused "Deputy President" with "Interim President". Perhaps there is a real governance development unfolding that specialist media has yet to report. Either way, this is information that I, as an editor, would not release without confirmation from an official source.

Three propositions, one question.

What troubles me is not the three propositions individually. It is that all three appear in a single report, and not one of them has been verified. When three checkable designations appear without a single number, a single date, a single citation – the problem is no longer an isolated error. The problem is method.

I call this phenomenon by the name I have given it myself: the factual fragility of general-media chess reporting. As chess steps out of specialist magazines and into mainstream sports pages, it brings the opportunity of wider reach, but it also brings a gap: the absence of experts in the newsroom. A general sports reporter can write beautifully about football, basketball, tennis, but has no tool to distinguish a "Candidates winner" from a "Candidates participant". And when a newsroom's incentive structure prioritises speed and traffic, that gap widens further.

Here I think of a line I once wrote, and I believe it holds in many contexts: "The transfer market is where people sell the future to buy hope." The news market operates the same way. People sell designations to buy attention. But in chess, where everything is traceable – Elo ratings, head-to-head records, tournament results – the price of selling a false designation is higher than in any other sport.

So what is really being handed over in Samarkand?

Setting aside the unverified designations, the real story still carries weight. Uzbekistan won the gold medal at the 2026 Olympiad – a historic feat for a Central Asian nation in a game long seen as the playground of Russia, the United States, India and China. FIDE granting the 2026 Olympiad hosting rights to Uzbekistan is a strategic signal: chess is expanding toward emerging markets. And the fact that the torch recipient is a young Uzbek player – rather than an official – shows that FIDE wants to bind this ceremony to the next generation, to the future of the sport, rather than to the administrative apparatus.

India, on the other side, is an entirely different story. After the Budapest Olympiad of 2026, India stands at the summit of world team chess with titles in both the Open and Women's sections. This is an achievement unprecedented in Olympiad history. The fact that both Anand – an Indian legend – and the President of the All India Chess Federation appeared in the ceremony handing the torch to an Uzbek player makes one thing very clear: India's influence within the governance structure of world chess is at its highest level ever, even when the event is held elsewhere.

There is a line I always carry with me in my writing: "An empty stadium – and memory remains." I think of past Olympiads, of boards long cleared away, of generations of players who passed through and left games behind. In chess, the stadium of memory is not the board; it is the numbers. A player's Elo rating is not a dry figure; it is the summary of thousands of games, hundreds of hours of analysis, decades of striving. When people replace that number with an unverified designation, they do not merely err on the facts; they erase the very memory the number represents.

A counter-current view.

The counter-intuitive thing I want to say here is this: the error in the Samarkand report is not the fault of one journalist alone. It is the fault of an entire information ecosystem that has forgotten that chess is one of the most verifiable sports in the world. No other sport has every result archived, every rating public, every game reproducible on a board. And yet in that most transparent of sports, three unverified designations slipped through in a single item.

This paradox has an explanation: the transparency of data does not automatically become the transparency of writing. People have the data, but people do not look up the data. People can Google a player's name in three seconds, but they do not, because the ceremonial story sounds more appealing than the factual one. And I understand that. I understand it because in this profession, all of us have been tempted by a beautiful story. But I also know something else: a beautiful story built on a false fact will collapse. A plain story built on a true fact can endure.

Here I want to say one more thing about the nature of designations in professional sport. In football, one can write "best player on the team" without a number, because form assessment is qualitative. But in chess, "number one player of a country" is an absolutely quantitative concept: it is the person with the highest Elo rating. This is a designation that cannot be bent by emotion. If mainstream sports journalism continues to apply football's qualitative writing style to chess, many fake "number one players" will be produced.

There is another dimension I want to look at, and it concerns the very person receiving the torch. Javokhir Sindarov, born in 2026, steps into the Samarkand ceremony at the age of his early twenties. He receives a torch, and – in the circulated articles – also receives a designation that in my view has not been verified. This is a burden no young player deserves to carry. I have witnessed the same in many sports: a young talent handed a designation too early by the media, and afterward judged by that designation rather than by themselves. In chess, where every error is recorded and analysed down to the move, that pressure is many times heavier.

I think of a line I wrote in a commentary on esports, and I believe it holds here too: "Esports taught me that youth is not in the muscles, but in the reflexes of the heart." That reflex can bear the pressure of the board, but can it bear the pressure of a false designation? I am not sure. And precisely because I am not sure, I choose to stand on the side of truth.

What should be drawn from this.

It is not that the torch ceremony is wrong. It is right, in the sense that a sport needs ceremony to enter public life. It is right, in the sense that a country like Uzbekistan deserves a moment of being seen by the world. It is right, in the sense that chess needs more than photographs of two people sitting silently at a board.

But what must be established alongside ceremony is factual discipline. This is not the story of one report. This is the story of an industry. Over the next twenty years, as chess continues to expand into new markets – Central Asia, Africa, Latin America – there will be hundreds of events like Samarkand that need coverage. If each such event produces three unverified designations, then after a decade, a generation of chess fans will grow up alongside a distorted picture of the very sport they love.

I have spent most of my career writing about sport, and the further I go, the more I believe that writing is not the craft of storytelling. It is the craft of verified storytelling. We cannot tell a good story without true facts. We cannot make a torch brighter by inflating the one who carries it.

In a piece about the pandemic of 2026, when the stadiums of Russia stood empty, I once wrote: "When the stadium holds no ball, memory begins to score." I think that line holds in this case too. When a tournament has not yet taken place, when a ceremony has just ended, when the games have not yet been played – the only thing we have to judge by is the memory of games already played. And that memory is only valuable if it is preserved accurately.

The torch in Samarkand will keep being passed. Perhaps it will reach another country in 2028, another continent in 2030. And each time, people will tell a story about a young player, about a rising nation, about a future being written. I hope those stories will be written with true numbers. I hope every young player is called by the right name, the right title, the right rating. Not because we need the boredom of data, but because we need the durability of memory.

A torch handed over may burn for a few days. A designation correctly recorded may burn for generations. The question I leave behind is not a question for the organisers, but for us writers: when the Samarkand torch goes out, what will remain in tomorrow's page – a flame, or a line that needs to be corrected?