Sri Lanka Is Quietly Having the Best Olympiad
By Cameron W. · Sun, 27 Sep 2026
Buried outside the top 15 of the women's crosstable in Samarkand, Sri Lanka's team is on course for a medal that has nothing to do with beating China or India.
Buried outside the top 15 of the women's crosstable in Samarkand, Sri Lanka's team is on course for a medal that has nothing to do with beating China or India. After Round 10, they sit 18th overall in the 190-plus team women's field with seven wins, three losses and no draws, good for 14 match points, and they are comfortably the best-performing team in what FIDE calls Group C.Group C isn't a pool teams play each other in. FIDE splits every Olympiad field into five rating categories before Round 3, sorted by each team's starting position in the initial rankings, so that a medal can go to the highest scorer in each category besides the very top one. It's a way of making sure a tournament this size, with federations ranging from India's world number ones down to teams that barely field four rated players, has more than one group of nations walking away with something. Sri Lanka's group includes Iceland, Panama, South Korea, Kenya and dozens of others in a similar rating band, and after ten rounds not one of them has more than 11 match points. Sri Lanka has 14.A rough start, then a runIt wasn't an obvious path to this. Back in Round 4, Sri Lanka lost 3-1 to the Philippines in a match that briefly had both teams sharing space around 13th place in the standings, hardly the kind of result that suggests a category medal is coming. Since then the team has strung together enough wins against similarly rated opposition to pull clear of the rest of its category by three full points with a round still to play, the gap that Iceland, Panama and the rest would need to close in the final round just to draw level.Category medals rarely get the attention overall podium finishes do. Nobody outside the delegations involved will remember, in a week's time, that Sri Lanka topped Group C at the 46th Olympiad while China and India fought over women's gold. But for a federation that isn't going to out-rate the world's largest chess-playing nations any time soon, a category medal is a real, tangible marker of a good Olympiad, the kind of result a smaller federation can point to when making the case for more funding or more attention back home.What's leftOne round remains. Sri Lanka's three-point cushion over the rest of Group C is close to safe barring a strange final-round collapse combined with a big final-round win for Iceland or one of the other chasers, but nothing is mathematically settled until the last pairing is played. If it holds, Sri Lanka's women will finish the Samarkand Olympiad with a medal that, while it won't show up on the overall standings anyone screenshots, is exactly the kind of result the category system was built to reward.