The global chess body Fide, responding to a wave of criticism from players, fans, and commentators, announcedon Friday afternoon that its flagship team event, the 150-nation biennial Olympiad, will not be held in Moscow in July-August as scheduled and that it is seeking an alternative host city.
The announcement came on Twitter: “Fide Council has decided that the 44th chess Olympiad will not take place in Russia. Fide will do our utmost to find another organiser for the Olympiad, and will provide more information in due time”.
Fide thus follows Uefa moving the Champions League final from St Petersburg to Paris, the FIA stripping Russia of its Formula 1 Grand Prix and the cancellation of five skiing events in Russia.
The Fide president, Arkady Dvorkovich, is a former deputy prime minister of Russia under Dmitry Medvedev, and the majority of the organisation’s financial backers and sponsors are Russian.
While several sporting organisations have dropped ties to Russian sponsors, no update has yet been given on whether Fide will continue to accept funds from its own backers, which include gas supplier Gazprom, the fertilizer giant PhosAgro, and mining firm Nornickel.
Dvorkovich is currently in Uganda on a Fide delegation with the Fidemanaging director, Dana Reizniece-Ozola, whose previous career was as minister of finance for Latvia.
On Facebook, she called the events in Ukraine a “brutal incursion” and said that the Ukrainian people have been caught in a “vicious game of power”.
The response of Garry Kasparov, a long-time Putin critic, has been swift and predictable.
“After years of warnings were ignored and hearing ‘Garry, you were right!’ all damn day today, I’ll repeat what I said in 2014: Stop telling me I was right and listen to what I’m saying now,” he wrote on Twitter.
Magnus Carlsen has had a rough week at the $150,000 online Airthings Masters, but the world champion still overcame the effects of Covid to reach the two-day final, which started at 5pm on Friday. Free to view live commentary by England’s David Howell and Jovanka Houska is available on chess24.com.
Carlsen was beaten four times in 15 games in the qualifying round, and blamed the defeats on symptoms which were similar to brain fog: “I lacked energy, which made it hard to focus, and when I tried to think I blundered.” Those who defeated him included included two teenagers: Russia’s Andrey Esipenko, 19, who had already scored against Carlsen at Wijk 2021, and India’s Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, 16.
The world champion kept his equilibrium, made sure of qualifying for the final eight, then eliminated Vietnam’s Le Quang Liem and Russia’s Vladislav Artemiev. By the time of Thursday’s semi-final the No 1 was back to his normal fearsome strength, playing the first game of the match in a classical attacking style.
Earlier, in the qualification rounds, Carlsen faced the Dragon Sicilian, and followed a formula advocated by Bobby Fischer: open up the h file, sac pieces if needed, expose the black king, then checkmate.
Thursday coincided with the invasion of Ukraine, and apart from Carlsen the other semi-finalists were all Russian. Ian Nepomniachtchi, crushed by the Norwegian in their world title match in Dubai two months earlier, was impressively back in form, winning the qualification section with rounds to spare and then eliminating the young pretender Esipenko in his semi-final.
Away from the board, Nepomniachtchi published a tweet which said: “History has seen many Black Thursdays, but today is blacker than the others” It was signed with the hashtag #saynotowar.
3804 (by Dragoslav Djaja) 1 Nh6!! If Rxh6 2 a8Q Rxa8 3 Rxa8 leads to K+R v K+R. If 1...Rxa7 or a3-a2 2 Rg7+! Ke6 3 Rg6+ Ke5 4 Rg5+ Ke4 5 Rg4+ Kf3 6 Rg3+ and the rook gives perpetual check on the g file.
