The Drama Continues: Team Montenegro Denied Rooms
By Douglas C. · Wed, 16 Sep 2026
India's hotel troubles in Samarkand weren't an isolated incident. A leaked email and a pointed public post from a longtime chess administrator suggest the Olympiad's accommodation problems reached considerably further than one delegation, and raise real questions about who was actually responsible for fixing it.
India's hotel troubles in Samarkand weren't an isolated incident. A leaked email and a pointed public post from a longtime chess administrator suggest the Olympiad's accommodation problems reached considerably further than one delegation, and raise real questions about who was actually responsible for fixing it.India's captain, Srinath Narayanan, had already gone public on September 15, saying his team landed five hours earlier with no rooms allocated at their designated hotel, the Silk Road by Minyoun, and no clarity on when that would change. He later said organizers told him the hotel had been overbooked and that the reservation had never been forwarded by the Local Organising Committee. Vidit Gujrathi confirmed the wait on his own account.A second document now shows India wasn't alone. An email dated September 13, sent from [email protected], the federation's own address, to Montenegro's national federation, informed them that some of their delegation had no room reservation at all, and asked the federation to arrange accommodation independently for anyone missing from the confirmed list. That the email came directly from FIDE, rather than solely from the host country's organizing committee, is itself notable, it indicates FIDE's own staff were directly involved in managing reservations rather than leaving the process entirely to local organizers.Ignatius Leong, a longtime figure in FIDE administration who says he co-authored the federation's Events Commission handbook in 2012, posted a sharply worded public response asking plainly who bears responsibility. His argument: since the email came from a FIDE address, FIDE itself oversees room reservations across the board, and typically works in direct collaboration with a Local Organising Committee for events of this scale, meaning responsibility doesn't stop with local organizers alone. He also claimed that delegates from federations aligned with candidate Wadim Rosenstein had separately gone without visas despite their teams already arriving, and that several teams from Africa, the Americas, and Asia weren't given hospitality even at a three-star standard. Those specific claims haven't been independently verified here, and Leong's post reads as pointed advocacy rather than a neutral account, but they add to a picture of an event whose logistics problems weren't confined to one country's delegation.Leong also argued that the failure traces back further than this week, to whoever inspected, or failed to properly inspect, Samarkand's facilities before the Olympiad was awarded to Uzbekistan in the first place, and suggested the FIDE delegates who approved that bid share some responsibility for what's followed.None of this changes the tournament's schedule, the Olympiad is proceeding as planned. But it lands at a genuinely awkward moment: FIDE's presidential election is now just ten days away, run by many of the same institutional structures now facing public criticism over this week's logistics failures, and Rosenstein's own alleged connection to the visa problems, however unverified, adds another thread to a campaign that's already produced a summer of overlapping complaints and accusations between all three tickets.