China Takes Its Seventh Olympiad Title, Kazakhstan and India Round Out the Podium
By Cameron W. · Sun, 27 Sep 2026
China has won the Women's section of the 46th Chess Olympiad, beating Vietnam 3-1 in the final round to finish two points clear of the field.
China has won the Women's section of the 46th Chess Olympiad, beating Vietnam 3-1 in the final round to finish two points clear of the field. It's China's seventh Olympiad gold, a number that puts this result less in the category of upset and more in the category of a program doing what it has done for most of the last two decades. Zhu Jiner and Lu Miaoyi both won their individual games in the deciding match, both finishing the tournament with individual gold medals on their boards to go with the team title.China controlled its own fate walking into the final round, needing only to avoid defeat against Vietnam to clinch it regardless of what happened elsewhere, and never let the pressure show. The margin at the top going into round 11, one clear point over Kazakhstan, turned into a comfortable two-point cushion by the time the match against Vietnam was over.Kazakhstan holds on for silverKazakhstan's own final round wasn't nearly as clean. Needing a win over Poland to keep any pressure on China, they settled for a 2-2 draw instead, a result that confirmed silver rather than opening any real path to gold. It's still a strong finish for a team that had spent most of the second half of the tournament chasing China without ever quite catching them, closing the gap to a single point after round 10 before the final round settled the order for good.India's escape act for bronzeThe bronze medal came down to one of the more dramatic finishes of the closing round. India needed results elsewhere to break their way just to have a shot at anything better than fourth, and while those results didn't fully cooperate, IM Savitha Shri produced the moment that mattered most for her own team, rescuing a 2-2 draw against Georgia's Meri Arabidze after escaping what had looked like a lost position. That draw, combined with how the rest of the field finished, was enough to put India on the podium in third.It's a fitting way for Savitha Shri's tournament to end. She was already one of the individual stories of this Olympiad, having climbed to 7 match points from her individual games earlier in the event, and her final-round save turned a personal highlight into a team medal.The bigger pictureBetween the two sections, the 46th Olympiad ends with Uzbekistan and China both defending, in different senses, ground they've held before: Uzbekistan adding a second Open gold to the one won in Chennai four years ago, and China extending a run of women's titles that already made it the most successful federation in the event's history. Neither result was a surprise by the time the final round began. Both were still earned on the board, right up to the last games played in Samarkand.