The beautiful minds of Nurgul Salimova, Gergana Peycheva, Antoaneta Stefanova, Victoria Radeva and Beloslava Krasteva brought Bulgaria its greatest sporting success in 2023, winning the European Team Chess Championship in Budva, Montenegro. Twenty-year-old Nurgul had won a silver medal at the Women's World Chess Championship in Baku just a few months earlier, and that success seemed to give her and her teammates wings.

In Azerbaijan, Nurgyul Salimova was outplayed by Russia's Aleksandra Goryachkina, a rival with more experience on the chessboard. "I could have won," she told her coach Zhivko Zhekov after the match.

“In fact, Nurgul was the one who made the game exciting," said the mentor who discovered her enormous talent back in 2009 when she was just six years old. "Nurgul's performance was fantastic, it's a huge step, in this way she skipped several stages in her development and made a big leap forward in chess.

The vice-champion feels that her lack of experience cost her the trophy, but she is proud of what she has achieved and feels increasingly confident among the world's elite chess players. Intuition, which helped her win the individual gold medal at the European Team Championships in Budva, is one of her strongest weapons.

"Sometimes, when I see a certain move, my heart starts racing three times faster and then I know it's the right one," she reveals.

"By qualifying for the World Championship, I have won the right to take part in the Candidates' Tournament in Toronto in April 2024," adds the chess player. - It will determine the challenger for the 2024 World Chess Championship".

At the European Team Championship in Budva, another Bulgarian star rose to the chess horizon - Gergana Peycheva, a business student in Dallas, who won the decisive victory. The Bulgarian champions finished with seven team victories, two draws and no losses.

"The match was intense - says Gergana Peycheva about her dramatic final against Georgia's Lela Javakhishvili. - At the beginning I was in a losing position because halfway through the match I failed to see a tactic my opponent noticed. She gained advantage while I struggled for a long time to get back into the game. There were a lot of mistakes on both sides as it was the last match, fatigue and pressure got the better of us and at one point she started to make mistakes and I was able to take advantage.

Paradoxically, Bulgarian chess players have received almost no funding in recent years, because seven federations are locked in a fierce battle over which one should be the official Bulgarian chess federation. Only a few days ago, one of them, the Bulgarian Chess Federation, was accepted into the International Chess Federation (FIDE), but the Bulgarian Chess Federation 2022, which is the only one licensed by the Bulgarian Ministry of Sport, is expected to challenge the decision before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.

According to Gergana Peycheva, the lack of good organisation and support due to the controversial management of Bulgarian chess certainly has a negative impact on the chess players. The question of whether the Bulgarian women's team will be able to maintain the same level at next year's Olympiad is therefore a cause for concern.

Youth triumphed in another sport - swimming, where eighteen-year-old Petar Mitsin set a world junior record in the men's 400 freestyle. This year, the swimmer also won three European titles in the same age group - the 200m, 400m and 800m freestyles, as well as the gold medal in the under-23 400m freestyle. At the Junior World Championships, Mitsin again finished first in the 400m freestyle and won two silver medals - in the 800m freestyle and the 200m butterfly - which earned him a quota for the 400m and 800m freestyle at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

"In February I will be competing at the World Aquatics Championships in Qatar and after that my preparation will be all about the Olympics," says the champion, who believes in his potential to reach the final in the French capital.

Two world-famous Bulgarians who, like the young swimmer, discovered the formula for success early on, have brought glory to their country this year.

Tennis player Grigor Dimitrov had his best season in five years. Starting from 28th in the world, he managed to climb 14 places. The Bulgarian also played in two finals - the ATP 250 Series on clay in Geneva and the ATP Masters 1000 in Paris, where he lost to Novak Djokovic, the top-ranked men's player. Grigor Dimitrov has also found a place in prestigious rankings such as Eurosport's, where his victory over Daniil Medvedev placed him sixth in the top 10 best matches of the year. Bulgaria's first racket was also nominated for sportsmanship for his gentlemanly behaviour on the tennis court.

By joining the Sacramento Kings, Alexander Vezenkov became the second Bulgarian to play in the NBA after Georgi Glushkov. Earlier in the year, he won the Greek championship with Olympiacos and played in the Euroleague final.

"Alexander Vezenkov has had an exceptional season - says Lyubomir Todorov, a sports journalist at BNR - last year he was Bulgaria's Sportsman of the Year and he deserves to be chosen again this year because he is the first Bulgarian to be named the most valuable basketball player in the Euroleague.

The golden girl of rhythmic gymnastics, Boryana Kaleyn, is the 2023 European all-around champion at the Baku Championships, the first gold medal for Bulgaria after a twenty-nine year hiatus. The Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics team of Zhenina Trashlieva, Sofia Ivanova, Kamelia Petrova, Rachel Stoyanov and Radina Tomova also won gold for Bulgaria for the first time since the 1990s.

Another outstanding success for the country's gymnastics - the Bulgarian team won the team world title in rhythmic gymnastics in the Spanish city of Valencia. Rhythmic gymnast Branimira Markova, who was a member of the gold medal-winning national team in Alicante, Spain, 30 years ago, was once again listening to the Bulgarian national anthem, this time as head coach of the ensemble.

The year 2023 also proved fruitful for some athletes in boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, skiing, athletics, taekwondo, kickboxing, karate and canoe/kayak. The country sends off the year with the good news that in 2024, the year of the Olympic Games, Sofia will be the World Capital of Sport.

It will also end on a note of cautious hope - that decent people with impeccable morals will take the helm of the Bulgarian Football Union; that the ignominious decline of football under Borislav Mihailov's 18-year reign, during which the national team failed to qualify for a single major tournament and anger turned to street pogroms, will be a thing of the past.