Gukesh’s Olympiad heroics hailed as ‘greatest ever’ by Scottish Grandmaster amid Indian chess star’s drastic step

D Gukesh's sensational performance from the 2024 Chess Olympiad, where he registered a stunning 9/10 score while playing on the top board, has been branded as "greatest ever" by Danish and Scottish Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard. The high praise for 19-year-old world chess champion Gukesh has come at a time when he has been forced to cut down his 2026 schedule to rediscover his form.

Indian Grandmaster Gukesh recently announced withdrawing from a few tournaments of the Grand Chess Tour to prepare for the defence of his world title later this year. Gukesh has not won any major tournament since becoming the world champion in December 2024. He recently finished at the bottom at Prague Chess Masters.

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As a result, Gukesh has decided to play fewer tournaments and focus more on training and recovery. And if he needs extra motivation, he can look back at his performance at the 45th Chess Olympiad, where he won an individual gold on board one as India won their first-ever Olympiad gold medal.

Gukesh's Olympiad performance called 'greatest ever'

The stellar performance was discussed once again recently when the social media handle of 2700chess.com, the world's most popular website for chess live ratings, shared a graphic of "Top 20 highest chess performances of all time (minimum 8 games played)."

Gukesh's Olympiad score was ranked second in the list, only behind Fabiano Caruana's 8.5/10 performance at Sinquefield Cup in 2014. He also came ahead of former world champions Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov.

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Replying to 2700chess's social media post on X (formerly Twitter), Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard said that Gukesh's Olympiad performance "is close to the greatest ever" when adjusted for the average rating of the top 100.

"If you adjust for average rating of top 100 at the time of play, you may see the list looking a bit different. I think the Gukesh Olympiad performance is close to the greatest ever," Aagaard said on X.

Indian fans would hope that Gukesh manages to catch the high praise for himself by Aagaard as he gets ready to return to his best once again.