Vaishali and Divya Deshmukh are stronger than when they won the Olympiad: what coach Misra sees

There is a sound I learned to listen for after forty years of sitting beside a chessboard: the sound of wood meeting wood when a hand has stopped trembling. Budapest, September 2026. For the first time in history, the Indian women's team touched Olympic team gold, and in the heavy silence of the hall, I heard it. The sound of young women setting down their pieces the way one sets down a promise. A few days ago, in a conversation after the event, coach Misra said something that made me stop mid-note: Divya Deshmukh and Vaishali Rameshbabu, his two students, are now stronger than when they won the Olympiad. It is a short sentence. But it hides something strange I want to take apart: how can a person be stronger than her own miracle? Stronger than the day an entire nation of more than a billion people watched the Indian flag fly at the very summit of the world of team chess. I thought I was exiled from the pitch; it turned out the chessboard was leading me deeper into myself. To understand that sentence, we must return to Budapest. From September 10 to September 23, 2026, the 45th Chess Olympiad took place in the Hungarian capital. India arrived with what was considered the youngest and deepest squad in its history. And they did something unprecedented: they won gold in both the open and the women's sections, in the same Olympiad. A first in the history of Indian chess. The women's team that year featured Harika Dronavalli on board one, Vaishali Rameshbabu on board two, Divya Deshmukh on board three, Vantika Agrawal on board four, and Tania Sachdev as reserve. Set beside the traditionally powerful women's squads, one difference becomes obvious: no single star had to carry the team. The victory came from many hands setting their pieces down at the right moment. Based on my experience following team events, this is the most important point. Team gold is not the story of an individual. It is the story of a training system thick enough to produce many players at the same time. And within that thickness, Divya and Vaishali are two peaks breaking above the surface. Divya Deshmukh was born in 2026. She is a product of an Indian generation raised under the reflected light of Viswanathan Anand, the man who brought this country five world titles and turned chess from an intellectual hobby into a career path one could actually take. Vaishali Rameshbabu was born in 2026, and if the name seems familiar, it is: she is the elder sister of Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, a player the whole world has been talking about since he was a small boy. That is the context. Now comes the hard part. When a coach says his students are stronger, what is he actually saying? In chess there are four measures people usually use, and each tells a different story. The first is the Elo rating. It is the driest number, and also the one the public remembers. But Elo is a photograph taken at a single moment. It does not tell you whether a player is rising or stalling. To know that, you must look at its path across many months, and at the quality of the opponents it was earned against. The second is performance rating, the actual level shown in a single event. A player can keep the same Elo while playing a tournament at an outstanding performance level. That says they are in better form than the label on their name suggests. The third, and the one I trust most, is the ability to convert a position. In chess there is a thin margin between an equal position and a laborious win. Beginners hold the equal position. Good players convert equality into a win. Great players convert a winning position into a win. The distance between those last two things, from having an advantage to winning, is where a player grows up technically. The fourth is time management. In team events like the Olympiad, the clock is sometimes the biggest opponent. Young players often lose not because they miscalculated, but because they thought too long about a move that did not deserve it, and then ran out of time in the endgame. When a young player fixes that habit, she really is stronger, even if the rating has not moved yet. There is a technical detail I want to stress. Modern chess does not have only one time control. Classical, rapid, and blitz demand three different skill sets. A person can be a blitz champion without ever reaching the classical crown. So when someone says a player is stronger, one must ask: stronger in which category? An improvement in blitz is sometimes just faster reflexes, not deeper thinking. And in classical chess, what decides is precisely deep thinking. So when coach Misra says Divya and Vaishali are stronger, I think he is speaking of the last two things. Of conversion, and of calm. Those are the things a coach sitting beside his students every day can see, and the audience cannot. But I must say this plainly, because it is a writer's duty. That statement is currently not proven by data. No Elo rating is cited. No tournament is named. There is no specific game for us to place on the table and examine move by move. It is an insider's judgment, based on professional observation. It deserves respect, but it remains an opinion, not a measurement. And this is where I want to pause longer, because it concerns a habit of the chess world I would very much like to change. People are teaching chess through numbers. Performance, rating, win rate, engine indices, match rates with engines. The data sheets are so long that it feels chess could be fully understood if we just entered enough figures. But I have sat before enough analysis interfaces to know one thing: chess is not in those sheets. It is in the moment a nineteen-year-old decides to sacrifice a pawn in the endgame, not because the computer suggested it, but because she felt the opponent would choose to defend. It is in a person rising from the board in the fourth hour of a five-hour game, walking a lap, and returning with a new order in her head. It is in the silence. When I heard coach Misra say that sentence, I remembered an evening in Da Nang, when I was invited to commentate a match in an empty stadium. The score was 0-0. I cannot recall a single passage of play. But I remember the sound of a defender's boots touching the ball, and a coach's shout echoing into the empty stands. The chessboard is the same. Its beauty usually lies where the machine does not record. But I do not fool myself. When a coach praises his students, he is also speaking about himself. He is the one who taught them, believed in them, placed them in the lineup. The sentence they are stronger is also the sentence my work is on the right track. That does not make the statement false. But it makes it something else: a justification for a choice, not a conclusion drawn from measurement. And I wonder: in Indian women's chess right now, with an entire generation having just reached the team summit, is a coach publicly saying his two students are on the rise a voice in the contest for future places? The Olympiad is played over eleven Swiss rounds, and teams must set a fixed board order. That means which board a player occupies is no small matter. The spots on board one, two and three will have to be redistributed. In such a race, a well-timed compliment carries more weight than people think. I accuse no one. I only say that a decent writer must distinguish measurement from opinion. And in this case, we have the opinion of a man standing very close to two young players. There is one more thing, subtler still. Both Divya and Vaishali are young women who have just touched the light. Divya was born in 2026, Vaishali in 2026. That age, in chess, is the age at which one is more easily called a prodigy than a player. And that label is toxic. It makes the public wait for a world title before the player has finished polishing her endgame. For Vaishali in particular, another light shines on her: she is Praggnanandhaa's elder sister. The media love to place the two siblings side by side. But Praggnanandhaa is a phenomenon that happened earlier, at a different point on the road. Comparing two siblings in the same article sounds sweet, but it is a wrong yardstick. No one can measure a woman raised in India by her younger brother's path. Memory does not keep the score; memory keeps the hand. What I believe, after all this, is this: the Olympiad gold is a hard fact. It happened, it has been written into the history of Indian chess. But it is a team achievement. And team chess imposes a very different pressure from individual chess. In a team event, a player can lose a game and the team still wins. In an individual world-title match, no one carries you. Leaping from one to the other is a far bigger leap than the golden medal table leads people to believe. The board does not lie; the one sitting before it does. To place this story in its proper spot, one must look at the larger picture. The world of women's chess over the past two decades has had two poles. One is the Chinese system, where Hou Yifan and Ju Wenjun successively held the world crown, trained within a tight and enduring national machine. The other is the rest of the world, where individuals rise and then sink, and no one sustains a dynasty. In recent years India has wanted to become the third pole. And it has grounds to do so. Not only because of two gold medals in Budapest. But because of a system: academies, investment from large corporations, the growing number of domestic events, and a successor generation so deep that people must fight for a place on the national team. In that context, coach Misra's sentence carries a deeper meaning than the headline. When he says his two students are stronger, he is saying that India is not standing still after the glory. The most frightening thing about a golden generation is contentment. A generation that halts after gold will be displaced by the very generation behind it. If Divya and Vaishali are truly stronger, the message is not only about them. It is about the machine not having slowed down. But there is a risk few bother to voice, and I will voice it because I have reached the age of having seen it many times. After a moment like Budapest, what descends on young players is not criticism. It is invitations. Brand ambassadorships. Appearances. Talks. Flights. Events that do not add much to professional skill but add money. For the young, that schedule arrives exactly when they most need silence to study the endgame. And it also arrives exactly when their bodies and minds need rest. I have seen too many talents worn down not by a stronger opponent, but by a chain of unnecessary games. I have no right to interfere in other people's affairs. But I have the right to write it down, so readers see that a compliment and a curse can come out of the same mouth. When the public says she is stronger now, they are also saying then prove it. And that burden, placed on the shoulders of a girl born in 2026, is as heavy as a queen driven into a corner. I return to the opening sentence. Divya Deshmukh and Vaishali Rameshbabu are stronger than the day they won the Olympiad. If that is true, it is not just good news for two people. It is news of a rising current. But if we want to know whether it is true, we must do something sports journalism rarely tolerates: wait. Wait for the next tournament. Wait for real games. Wait to see, in a position with an advantage, whose hand sets the piece down before it trembles. As for me, I will sit back at my table, replay the sound of the pitch recorded in the years without crowds, and believe that there are games which need no championship and are still full of pain. A teacher's sentence can open a chapter. It can also be a comfort only for the teacher himself. Neither is a problem. What matters is that we do not rush to give it a name. Because in chess, every game truly ends only when someone agrees to lay down their king. And no score sheet can replace that moment.