Morozevich and Jakovenko talking about the Olympiad
Psychological barrier and heavy schedule
Posted by Chessdom
Alexander Morozevich assures that the atmosphere inside the Russian team was good, but they simply couldn’t overcome the psychological barrier.
“I do not like to write it all to bad luck”, Morozevich said to TK Sports correspondent Dmitry Lukashov, “The fact that Armenia won the second consecutive gold is not a random coincidence. This is the second Chess Olympiad where we were unable to overcome the psychological barrier, so now we need to seriously think about the situation.”
“The team atmosphere was good. We have players who perform better in a team, and also those that prefer individual play. I think we were far from the optimal form in this tournament, and we didn’t have a team leader. Vladimir Kramnik assumed that position, but this year was not the best in his career.
Dmitry Jakovenko says that Russian team is certainly not weaker than the champions from Armenia.
“Unfortunately, we were unable to repeat the victory we have achieved at the 2007 European Team Chess Championship. Many of the matches finished different than we anticipated, perhaps, the season’s entire heavy tournament schedule is to blame. We are not weaker than Armenia, we won against them and Ukraine at the European Championship, so why wouldn’t we win again.”
The Russian teams underperformed and so was China, especially the women. The Chinese women was doing well until they drew with the US and then two losses in a row and drew the last match. This format has an element of luck since the draws can be unfair. Better
luck next time.
The Russian team definitely is still the strongest but the margin of error at the top is very small in Olympiads these days. Comes down to form during the tournament. Even one player who comes into the tournament with a dodgy form can ruin the party for the rest of the team. As Karpov said in the press conference with Susan that him and Kasparov would just play out the tournament without a break if they identified someone was in bad form. Guess they had stronger mental stamina than the current lot..
The Russian team played not bad actually although they could performed better. Don’t forget the medal winning teams like Armania, Georgia, Ukraine are all countries of former USSR. Even the American teams (men and women), most players are from the formal USSR and Gelfand of Isreal is from Ukraine.