The Anti-Motivator and the Silent Killer: Inside Uzbekistan's Gold-Medal Team

After the closing ceremony in Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s five gold medalists sat down with ChessBase India’s Sagar Shah, and the resulting interview is less a victory lap than a portrait of how this team actually works. The results are in our final-round report. This is about the personalities behind a 10-0-1 record, and they are considerably funnier than that record suggests.

Shah ended with a round of compliments: each player names one quality of the teammate beside him. The answers double as a team sheet. Sindarov calls board-one star Nodirbek Abdusattorov “a leader.” Abdusattorov praises Nodirbek Yakubboev’s “fighting spirit.” Yakubboev calls Shamsiddin Vokhidov “a silent killer” who “speaks only when he is 100% sure.” Vokhidov’s verdict on Mukhiddin Madaminov: “a good boy.”

The best line belongs to Madaminov, who describes Sindarov as an “anti-motivator,” meaning “the person who always kills your motivation.” Sindarov’s defense is that bullying is the highest form of encouragement. “The best motivation is when you start bullying your teammate or your brother,” he says, adding that Madaminov “is my second and my brother.”

Sindarov is just as unsparing about himself. Against Ivanchuk in the final round, he says, he spent 40 minutes trying to recall a line he had seen before the tournament, and failed. “It was a very unhappy moment.” He drew anyway and takes a philosophical view: “When I draw, I understand that we will win the match easily.”

That day the winning was done by Madaminov on board four, the point that decided the gold. It is a division of labor that only works among people who trust each other, and the rest of the interview suggests they do.

The vocabulary is a generation’s. Asked about his queen sacrifice against Peru, Sindarov says 31…Kf7 was “making some aura” and that he decided, “let’s play for some videos, for some content.” Then he waves off the brilliance: “it’s an easy move.”

Abdusattorov trades in the same currency. He told his teammates about twenty minutes before a game that he would meet 1.e4 with …d5, and “everyone went crazy.” The idea, he says, came from Arjun Erigaisi’s last-round win with it in Budapest, “so I also tried to steal his aura.” It is the language of players raised on streams and clips, applied to a team that just won an Olympiad.

Home pressure runs through the whole conversation. Madaminov admits the start was hard: “There was so much pressure on me in the first two rounds.” Abdusattorov is blunt about how home Olympiads go wrong, pointing to India in Chennai in 2022: “They were very close, but at some critical moments they made mistakes.” The remark lands harder because Uzbekistan won that Olympiad.

Yakubboev calls the round-six match against India the hinge of the tournament: “If we had lost that match, I don’t think we would have tried to win this medal.” He remembers feeling “a bit happy” when Nihal Sarin captured on g5; he had seen that …Kg7 was the winning move instead.

Abdusattorov says the whole team was glued to the game: “Our chat was screaming.” The finish is in our report on Yakubboev’s knight fork.

The warmest passage is about the captain. Yakubboev calls Rustam Kasimdzhanov “our hero because we grew up watching his achievements and his games,” adding that “If it weren’t for him, maybe some of us wouldn’t be playing chess.” Kasimdzhanov, the 2004 FIDE world champion, was pictured lifting the trophy, and Shah says he had never seen him show so much emotion.

The state’s backing is hard to miss. Vokhidov’s summary is simple: “our President supports chess. He takes care of us.” ChessBase India reported that each player receives $200,000 from the government and the coach $50,000.

The farewells sum the team up. Sindarov’s was “See you at the next tournament.” Abdusattorov’s, delivered with a smile in Sindarov’s direction, was “See you in Geneva!” Sindarov meets Gukesh there from November 22 in the world title match, and how much of this teasing survives a match like that is anyone’s guess.