The Ukrainian men's national team has broken the hegemony of the Russian team at the Chess Olympiads. In the Spanish city of Calvia, the Ukrainians secured a confident victory, finishing three points ahead of their nearest pursuer – the Russian team. The Armenians finished third, having scored the same number of points as Russia but losing to the former champions by just one rating point. For the Ukrainian national team, this victory was the first in its history. Before this, for six years in a row, our northern neighbors celebrated victory.
In the final round of the Olympiad, the Ukrainian team crushed the French with a score of 3:1 and scored 39.5 points. These are the chess players who won this victory for Ukraine: Vasyl Ivanchuk (Lviv), Andriy Ponomariov (Kyiv), Andriy Volokitin (Lviv), Oleksandr Moiseienko (Kharkiv), Pavlo Ulianov (Kharkiv) and Serhiy Karjakin (Simferopol). By the way, 14-year-old Karjakin showed the best result at the Olympiad and won individual gold on board six. The Ukrainian has 6.5 points out of 7 possible. The most points for the Ukrainian team were brought by Ivanchuk – 9.5 (out of 13 possible), and the fewest by Ponomariov – 4 (out of 8).
The Ukrainian women's national team in the final round of the women's tournament was unable to resist the Georgian team and lost with a score of 0.5:2.5. As a result, the Ukrainian women finished in 18th place. The champions of the chess Olympiad were the Chinese women, with 31 points. In second place, the chess players from the USA finished the competition – 28 points, and third were the Russians – 27.5 points.