Chess Olympiad Nations Map

The interactive map needs JavaScript. Here is the underlying record.

Every nation that has played in the Chess Olympiad, mapped by appearance count: 218 nations across 49 Open editions (1924–2026) and 198 nations across 31 Women’s editions (1957–2026). Historical teams — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East and West Germany — are shown on their successor territory under their own historical names.

Team golds — Open (45 official editions)

Nation	Golds
Soviet Union	18
United States	6
Russia	6
Hungary	3
Armenia	3
China	2
Ukraine	2
Germany	1
Poland	1
Yugoslavia	1
India	1
Uzbekistan	1

Team golds — Women’s (30 official editions)

Nation	Golds
Soviet Union	11
China	6
Georgia	4
Russia	3
Hungary	2
Ukraine	2
Israel	1
India	1

Most appearances — Open

Denmark, Austria, Sweden — 43
Netherlands, Argentina, France — 42
Hungary, Finland, United States, Poland — 41

Scope

The first official Olympiad was London 1927, with 16 nations; Hungary took gold.
The 1924, 1926, and 1936 events are included as unofficial, and have no recorded line-ups.
Second teams (Germany B/C, India-2/-3, Russia B/C and similar) are not counted as nations.
Non-national federations (IBCA, IPCA, ICCD, ICSC) are excluded.
The 2020 and 2021 online Olympiads are excluded from medal totals.

Results from Wikipedia and OlimpBase, with 2012 and 2014 line-ups filled from chess-results.com. Boundaries from Natural Earth 50m map units.

Skip the map — go to the legend and data

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How to use

Click a country for its full Olympiad record. Type a year to light up every nation that played that edition, or click any year chip in a popup to jump there.

Appearances

1–4 Olympiads

5–14

15–29

30–39

40 or more

Never played

Medals

Gold — team champion

Silver

Bronze

Host cities

Olympiad host city

Historical teams (USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East / West Germany) are shaded on their successor territory and are always labelled by their historical name.

Final placements

Podium finish (top 3)

Hover or focus any year chip in a popup to read that team’s finishing position for that edition, e.g. “1964 — 3rd of 50”.

Scoring basis

Team standings were decided on game points through 2006 and on match points from 2008 onward. A finishing position from either side of that break is not directly comparable with the other. Open any host city pin to read the exact rule used for that edition, tie-breaks included.

About the data

What counts as an appearance: one entry per nation per edition in which it fielded a team. Second and third squads (India 2, Georgia 3, Hungary B) are merged into their nation and never counted twice. The four non-national federations that enter Olympiads — IBCA (blind), IPCA (physically disabled), ICCD/ICSC (deaf) — are excluded, because they map to no territory.

Unofficial editions: 1924 Paris, 1926 Budapest and 1936 Munich are shown but flagged, and are left out of medal totals; FIDE does not count them. Medal tallies therefore cover 45 official Open and 30 official Women’s editions. The 2020 and 2021 online Olympiads are out of scope entirely — they were played on the internet with a different format.

Placements: final standings for 5,801 of 5,874 nation-editions (98.9% Open, 98.5% Women’s). Positions run continuously through split finals, so a team placed 13th in the 1954 Final B reads 13th overall. A handful of registered teams withdrew before playing and were never ranked — 13 in the 2024 Women’s event alone — so they carry no position. Where a nation’s roster is recorded but the edition predates published standings, the position is simply blank; nothing is estimated.

Historical teams: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, Great Britain, Palestine and Rhodesia are kept as distinct nations rather than folded into their successors, and are shaded on the successor territory. Source codes are reused across eras, so teams are matched by printed name first.

Second squads: hosts and strong federations sometimes entered a B or C team. These are folded out so they cannot displace the nation’s own result, which means two bronze medals — Russia B in 1994 and India 2 in 2022 — sit with a second squad rather than a nation, and national bronze totals sum to 43 rather than 45.

Download the data

Free to reuse with credit. CSV is UTF-8, comma-delimited.

Appearances & placements (CSV) Nations summary (CSV) Editions & hosts (CSV) Complete dataset (JSON)

Data currency

Version 1.6.0, complete through the 45th Olympiad (Budapest 2024). The 46th Olympiad runs 15–27 September 2026 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with a record 400 teams entered (208 Open, 192 Women’s). It appears on the timeline as scheduled and carries no results until it has been played. Both 2026 entries need a data refresh once the final standings are published.

Sources

Rosters, standings and medal records compiled from OlimpBase (the reference archive of Olympiad results), chess-results.com for the 2012–2024 events, FIDE for official confirmations, and Wikipedia for cross-checking. Borders are Natural Earth 1:50m map units. Every edition’s top three was re-derived from the standings independently of the medal records, and the two agree across all 77 completed events — the one conflict this surfaced, an 1927 bronze filed under England, is corrected here to Great Britain.

Nations table