Quiet presence, but powerful

I was quite pleased to see Uzbekistan win the Open section of the 46th Chess Olympiad in Samarkand yesterday. It was rather appropriate that the Uzbek team won the gold medal on home soil, especially considering the remarkable crop of young players the country has produced in recent years.

The five members of the team were Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Javokhir Sindarov, Nodirbek Yakubboev, Shamsiddin Vokhidov and Mukhiddin Madaminov. An exceptionally talented bunch, led by Sindarov and Abdusattorov, both still very young by any normal measure of things. Sindarov is only 21 and Abdusattorov 22, yet both have already established themselves among the world's strongest players.

But as I watched the matches over the past couple of weeks, I found myself noticing somebody vaguely familiar who wasn't actually playing. Didn't really recognised him at first, but there he was, Rustam Kasimdzhanov, the team's non-playing captain.

It was in 1998 that I first met Kasimdzhanov. He was just 19 years old and playing for Tashkent in the Asian Cities Team Chess Championship at Genting Highlands. I remember him because he spoke excellent English. He was already a grandmaster then, but of course nobody knew what the future held for this young Uzbek player.

I happened to be involved in that tournament as an arbiter, so I saw him around the event. Six years later, he would become FIDE World Champion. He subsequently went on to become a highly respected coach and second, working with players such as Viswanathan Anand and Fabiano Caruana in their world championship campaigns.

Now, nearly three decades after I first saw him in Genting, here he was again, this time supporting a new generation of Uzbek players. During the Olympiad, he was constantly around. He was there from the beginning of the rounds and when the games were over, he was still there. When one of his players won, he was there to congratulate him. When one of them suffered an occasional loss, he was there to offer some consolation.

He wasn't doing anything dramatic and for the most part, he wasn't the person the cameras were looking for. The attention naturally belonged to the four players sitting at the boards. They were the ones winning the games and collecting the points. But Kasimdzhanov provided the quiet, steady presence behind them.

I thought that was quite important in a team competition like the Chess Olympiad. These young players may be tremendously strong, but they are still playing 11 demanding rounds under considerable pressure. There will inevitably be good days and bad days, and having somebody with Kasimdzhanov's experience around throughout the tournament must have been useful, even if much of what he did would never show up in the tournament statistics.

And there was something quite nice about it for me. In 1998, I was watching an 19-year-old Kasimdzhanov playing first board for Tashkent. Yesterday, I was watching a 47-year-old man on the other side of the chessboard, so to speak, helping Uzbekistan's latest generation of young stars win the Olympiad.

The players received all the attention after their victory in Samarkand, but there was also the quiet man who had been with them throughout the journey, and whom not many people noticed. Perhaps after nearly 30 years in top-level chess, Kasimdzhanov knows that sometimes the most useful thing you can do is simply to be there when it matters.