‘If India won a medal, we owe it to her’: Captain Swayams on Savitha's heroics

NEW DELHI: Across the open and women's sections at the Chess Olympiad, only one player won an individual gold medal for India at the 2026 Chess Olympiad in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. That was Chennai's 19-year-old Savitha Shri Baskar. Savitha was often the one India could rely on when the team was staring at heartbreak. With her games routinely going down to the wire, she was kept fuelled, game after game, by someone making sure she never had to think about anything other than the board during India's bronze-clinching campaign."If we wanted something, he was always there, giving us everything, like water, bananas, and for me, he was bringing endless coffees because I played till the last moment, making sure that I ate properly and got energy," Savitha recalled, before labelling Swayams Mishra as the "best captain ever".For Mishra, it was new territory in a role he'd long been adjacent to."I've been…