Chess Unlikely to be Olympic Sport During My Time, Says Vishy Anand
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012Hi everyone,World chess champion Vishy Anand said getting chess included in the Olympics is a lengthy process and it is not likely to happen during his playing days.
"Not really. At the moment, it is pretty remote, and anyway, due to the lag, from acceptance till the day it finally becomes a medal sport; I mean, first you become a demonstration sport, then a medal sport, so there is a huge lag. It essentially does not apply to me anymore. I will not play in the Olympics. It will be well into the future before that happens," Anand said.
Anand expressed optimism about the current young Indian chess players. He predicted that they would eventually establish themselves among the top players in the world. "I think it will inevitably follow. We have many people doing it occasionally. I believe eventually somebody will break that thing and just be a stable top-10 player. The nice thing is, it's happening both in the men's game and the women's game. So Koneru Humpy, for instance, is quite stable as number two-number three in the world among women," he said.
Anand further said he was committed to taking his sport to as many schools as possible, in order to increase the existing pool of young chess players, as well as empowering students with skills that would help them in their studies.
"One of the things I focused on in the last eight or nine years is to get chess more into schools. The idea was to increase participation levels in chess, but especially target(ing) young students, based on the idea that chess itself can be very healthy in school, to train certain skills which are useful in studies as well. At the NIIT Mind Champions academy we have now crossed one and a half million students, and that is a big milestone for us," he said.
From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com Labels: anand, Chess, olympics
Is chess getting closer to being in the Olympics?
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012Hi everyone,
The London Organizing Committee of the 2012 Olympic Games has invited Grandmaster Le Quang Liem to run about 300 meters in the 70-day torch procession that will visit more than 1,000 cities and towns in the UK prior to the official opening ceremony on July 27 in London.
Liem, who will join 100 other outstanding individuals in the torch relay. On January 22, Liem will fly to the UK to compete in the Gibraltar Chess Festival, which takes place from January 23 to February 2. The young grandmaster, ranked 29th in the world on the Fide rating list, has a packed chess schedule for the year. He would be going to Russia for the Aeroflot Open 2012, from February 6 to 18, the Asian Championships in May, and the world team chess championship in August.
Chess players would certainly like to see the sport included in the Olympics at some time in the future. You can read the full post here about how Chess Queen Alexandra Kosteniuk feels that chess should be part of the bigger Olympic movement:
From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
Labels: Chess Queen Alexandra Kosteniuk, le quang liem, olympics
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