Richard Rapport praises ‘safety net’ that has helped India’s chess stars rise meteorically

Richard Rapport

“When I saw Team Gukesh (at the World Chess Championship), it was a very impressive team of people. To be able to afford and to be able to maintain such a setup, it's just very impressive,” Rapport tells The Indian Express in an interview

Richard Rapport remembers being impressed when a newly-minted world champion Gukesh Dommaraju rattled off the names of the Avengers that he had assembled to help him dethrone Ding Liren at the world chess championship in 2024. At that world championship in December last year, the Hungarian grandmaster, who has made a name for himself as a man who can think out of the box and brings plenty of creativity in openings besides wild and unpredictable moves, was at the other side of the battlefield, having enlisted with Team Ding for both of the Chinese grandmaster’s world championship battles.

“When I saw Team Gukesh, it was a very impressive team of people. To be able to afford and to be able to maintain such a setup, it’s just very impressive,” Rapport tells The Indian Express in an interview ahead of the third edition of the Global Chess League where he will represent the American Gambits franchise.

For his first assault at the world champion’s crown, the then 18-year-old from Chennai had brought together a team of six seconds: Grzrgorz Gajewski (his long-time trainer), Radoslaw Wojtaszek, Jan Krzysztof Duda, Jan Klimkowski, Pentala Harikrishna and Vincent Keymer. Then, there was also mind guru Paddy Upton, who has coached the Indian cricket team and the Indian hockey team in the past, besides five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand helping out as a mentor. What was impressive about this team was the presence of players like Duda and Keymer, who have their own world championship ambitions, and yet were convinced to help the Indian teen out.

While Rapport understandably does not want to reveal how big Team Ding was, he does point out that the financial support Gukesh was able to muster to put together such an impressive team was not surprising. After all, over the years he has seen the amount of monetary support his Indian counterparts received from sponsors back in India. This has also corresponded with an unprecedented crop of Indian youngsters who have shown they are poised to be world beaters. With Gukesh Dommaraju already becoming the youngest world champion in the sport’s history last year, the Indian teams also swept gold medals at the Chess Olympiad, while Divya Deshmukh won the FIDE Women’s World Cup and Praggnanandhaa came close to winning the open World Cup as well. R Vaishali then claimed the FIDE Women’s Grand Swiss title twice while Vidit Gujrathi too won the open event in 2023.