The shenanigans have started early in this year's election for FIDE president. Although he has ignored my advice to go with "Karpov: No Aliens" as a slogan in favor of the Obamavich
"A Champion of Change," which has a cute double meaning but fails to address the key issue of the current leadership of FIDE being totally bonkers. (Anyone else catch
David Kaplan's Russian interview, in which he says that 1) every language has words for "mother," "sex," and "chess" and 2) FIDE is coming, any day now, with a big social networking platform. Oh yeah, can't wait. And he's supposed to be the sane one, the businessman brought in to shape things up. Doing a heckuva job, Kappy.)
But the real news is that there's a big battle going in Russia for the nomination of the federation for FIDE president. It's been at full boil for a while now and a meeting was scheduled for mid-May for the RCF's supervisory council to hash it out and vote, or find a legal way to remain neutral and allow both Ilyumzhinov and Karpov to run. Meanwhile, both candidates had backup plans. Karpov has already been nominated by various federations, including France and Germany. Since he was a member of teams in those countries he is part of those federations. A loophole, but at least one that favors someone actually playing chess. You know, chess. Ilyumzhinov was preparing his own loophole of having current FIDE Presidential Board nominate him, which is attractively syllogistic.
Suddenly today, RCF head Arkady Dvorkovich, who just took over in a big reorg last February, pops up with a letter and a news conference saying they are endorsing Kirsan. Eh? What about the big meeting and the vote? He said he "talked to several council members on the phone," which doesn't exactly fill the requirements described in the new RCF charter. So from what I was hearing before the Russians went to bed, this is a sneaky move from Ilyumzhinov (who is apparently buddy-buddy with Dvorkovich) to preempt the RCF vote and try to win without a fight. Of course Karpov could likely still run anyway, using the aforementioned loophole, but obviously if he can fight this on the proverbial Russian front, he should.
Wow, a FIDE election with sneakiness and shenanigans, who would have imagined? I hope Karpov has the bottle, as the Brits say, for the street-fighting necessary to take this to the end. We know he's a hell of a competitor, but going up against his own federation isn't really his style. (And Dvorkovich is also an adviser to Medvedev.) I hope he does, because from what his website says he's putting together the resources to fight the sort of battle Bessel Kok couldn't afford to fight last time. You know that type of battle, the one in which 20 boxes of sets and clocks and 40 business class tickets spread out in the developing world is enough to match the votes of all of Western Europe and a million players. I honestly don't blame the barely-existent federations for grabbing a little something the only time anyone ever pays any attention to them. It's changing that, and actually working with them and developing them year in year out, that is why Ilyumzhinov needs to go. And the sponsorship. And the time controls. But mostly the aliens.
Article Source:
Daily Dirt Chess Blog
