🇨🇿 Jan Paloncý

The competition has been held annually since 1968 and each country may send at most four students, which makes the field small relative to the population it filters. The examination is in two parts, sat on separate days. The theoretical paper runs five hours and covers physical, organic, inorganic and analytical chemistry alongside biochemistry, typically through long problem sets built around a real system — a catalytic cycle, a natural product synthesis, a spectroscopic puzzle. The practical paper also runs five hours and is conducted in a teaching laboratory, where contestants perform syntheses, titrations and analyses on apparatus they meet for the first time that morning.

Chemistry olympiad problems have a particular character. They are not primarily about recall — the syllabus is published in advance and preparatory problems are released months beforehand — but about reading an unfamiliar system correctly under time pressure. A well-set question gives a student everything needed and still defeats most of the field, because the reasoning chain is long and a single misassigned stereocentre or misread equilibrium constant propagates through every subsequent part.

The practical examination is where the medal table is usually decided. Laboratory work is graded on the quality of the result — the yield and purity of a synthesis, the accuracy of a titration — and on the record the student keeps while producing it. Contestants from countries with strong school laboratory traditions have a structural advantage that no amount of theoretical preparation replaces. Safety protocol is enforced strictly, and time in the laboratory is absolute: whatever is on the bench when the clock stops is what gets marked.

The 58th IChO ran from 10 to 19 July 2026 in Tashkent, hosted by Uzbekistan. Its gold medallists came from more than twenty countries, with Paloncý of the Czech Republic named first on the official list published by the organising committee on 18 July, ahead of Daniel Lin of Australia and Debadatta Priyadarshi of India. India, China and Vietnam finished jointly first on the overall medal tally, each returning four gold medals from four students.

The Czech Republic has a long and quietly consistent record at the science olympiads — the country co-hosted the 50th IChO in 2018 alongside Slovakia, in Prague and Bratislava, and its national chemistry olympiad is one of the oldest continuously run competitions of its kind in central Europe. Selection follows a familiar pattern across categories and rounds, ending with a national final from which the four-student international team is drawn and trained at university laboratories.

An IChO gold medal is a narrow certification and worth stating exactly: roughly the top tenth of a field composed of the four best pre-university chemists from each participating country. It says that a student can hold a long analytical argument together for five hours in a second language, and then execute clean bench work under examination conditions the following day. Jan Paloncý did both in Tashkent in July 2026, and finished at the top of the list of those who did.