The 45th Chess Olympiad starts in Budapest next week. If you doubt that it merits the title of “coolest international competition in sports,” then answer this: does any other single sport (or game) have the national teams of 198 countries come together in one place for a single tournament? That’s how many national federations have pre-registered this year. Teams are of 5 players each, and play in two sections: open and women (politics aside).

In 2014, I attended the 41st Olympiad in Tromsø, Norway, paying my own way as a volunteer, for the chance to take in the action. It was amazing—and little did I realize that eight years later, I would play for Canada in the 44th Olympiad in Chennai, India. That tournament was the highlight of my chess career, likely never to be surpassed.

This year, I am a fan, following online. I couldn’t be happier to see that Canada is fielding probably our strongest ever women’s squad, with all five players rated over 2100 FIDE. Just to give a sense of how much stronger this team is than our last one: when I played on the team, we were seeded 54th, just behind Singapore. This year, we’re 27th, next to Argentina (who beat us in the final round back in 2022).

Here’s our lineup:

1. WGM Maili-Jade Ouellet
2. WIM Li Yunshan
3. WIM Pham Bich Ngoc
4. WIM Svitlana Demchenko
5. WFM Oksana Golubeva

I competed in the Canadian Women’s Championship this spring and finished in equal fifth, behind, you guessed it, our top four boards above. Oksana, too, is very strong (and also a major advocate for women’s chess, as a former Women’s Coordinator for the Chess Federation of Canada). My only two losses in the event were to Maili-Jade and Svitlana, my teammates from 2022—but I have never faced the others, or I’d likely have losses to report there as well!

On that note, I have made a short video on my game with Maili-Jade, to show what it’s like to face a player as strong as she is, in serious competition. Knowing how to play chess will help you follow along, but even if you don’t know how the pieces move, I think the gist of things should come through. I may also post a video of my game with Svitlana at some point, but I survived a lot longer in that one, and it would be a correspondingly longer story to tell.