Should Chess Be an Olympic Sport?
Tuesday, Aug. 05, 2008
By MEAGHAN HAIRE
TIME.com – TIME Magazine
What makes an Olympic sport? The games that get the official nod from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) can be controversial and sometimes bewildering: rhythmic gymnastics is considered a competitive Olympic sport, but ballroom dancing is not. Handball and badminton are part of the program, yet rugby and squash don’t make the cut. Among the 28 sanctioned sports for 2012, you can find table tennis but not golf, baseball, softball or racquetball.
Curling is also on the official Olympic roster, and that really piques Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE). Curling is simply “chess on ice, and it is an Olympic sport,” he says, “but classical chess is not!” Ilyumzhinov has been struggling for over a decade to get the board game of chess, a “sport of the mind,” accepted by the IOC.
The World Bridge Federation (WBF) — representing the card game of bridge — is similarly disgruntled. Like the chess federation, the WBF has been lobbying since 1995 to claim a piece of the Olympic spotlight. In their efforts, both organizations have even offered to submit players to drug testing in order to conform to the Olympics’ anti-doping code standards. Once again, however, both bridge and chess were denied entry last year.
Neither FIDE nor WBF is taking the rejection lightly. Gaining recognition as an official Olympic sport could greatly benefit the games, raising their profiles in countries where they don’t get much government funding. At one point, FIDE considered suing the IOC in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which handles international sport disputes in Lausanne, Switzerland, but later relented. Peter Rajcsanyi, public-relations director of FIDE, admits that “our strength is not in the court” and that FIDE is now in “the process of serious negotiations [with the IOC] and improving relations.” To that end, the chess organization has opened an office in Lausanne with the aim of getting closer to IOC officials, as well as promoting chess as an international sport, Rajcsanyi says.
Adding official sports to the Games is a tricky matter, in part because of the bloated size of the event. IOC spokeswoman Emmanuelle Moreau says the Olympic Games are already so big that many cities can’t accommodate them. So when IOC president Jacques Rogge took office in 2001, he capped the number of sports at 35 (28 in summer, seven in winter) and implemented a regular review process to avoid further expanding the Olympic program.
The IOC now votes on new sports and reviews existing ones, based on thorough technical analyses and specific criteria, after each Olympics. (The Beijing Games will be the last to include baseball and softball; the IOC has cut them for 2012.) The IOC granted the bridge and chess organizations Recognized International Sports Federations status in 1995 and 1999 respectively, but says it hasn’t accepted either game into the official register because they both lack the essential feature of physical activity. “Mind sports, by their nature, cannot be part of the program,” says Moreau, though she says the IOC hasn’t rejected their bids entirely.
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Hi Susan,
I am confused. Aren’t you already a 4 time Olympic champion? If chess is not an Olympic sport, how did you become an Olympic champion?
Chess has its own Olympic which is held every 2 years. The chess Olympiad this year will take place in Dresden, Germany. In fact, chess Olympiad has more nations participating than the Summer Olympic. I think she won 5 Olympic gold, not 4.
yeah, chess olympic is more exciting than the summer olympic. dresden is also nicer than beijing.
As for chess becoming an Olympic “sport”, I suppose one could say that many of the chess organziations (FIDE, USCF etc) are incompetent, corrupt and badly enough run to qualify.
I love chess, but it’s not a sport. Sports require athletic ability, chess requires only mental abilities, thus not a sport. Also, I’m tired of seeing NASCAR highlights on SportsCenter. I don’t care how many people watch it, it’s not a sport…
What defines a sport? Is it something that exherts (pardon the spelling there) one? If so, then you might be suprised how much physical energy a chess player at top level uses, (anyone who has watched the likes of Boris Gelfand up close may get some idea) and how much weight can be lost during a long match.
I personally do not think chess should be an olympic sport, I think we have our own olympiad, what more do we need? However, if we are going to be strict about what a sport is, then I must say that I personally fail to see what is so taxing about archery, or shooting, for example …. and even diving could be classed as borderline.
No, I do not think that chess should be Olympic Sport.
The Olympic committee could establish a separate set of games for digital sports, just as it separated the summer and winter Olympic games.
But adding chess to the current (winter?) games would be dubious.
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I am a little surprised no DIGITAL SPORTS OLYMPICS has yet happened, because costs could be low.
After all, NO PRIZE MONEY is needed (the Olympics is an amateur event).
No special facilities need to be built, just need tables and chairs for chess, bridge, Twixt, Dominos, etc.
Playing in the chess Olympiads is something the grandmasters really enjoy doing, probably because it is a TEAM event.
The USCF should leverage its unique central position to organize or encourage TEAM class level rated play over the InterWeb.
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I like Genem’s idea. If I remember correctly chess only comes second to soccer on number of national federations. Since we already have an Olympiad, FIDE should include Bridge and other mind sports in it. If that turns to be a success it would be easy to lobby the IOC to open a third schedule.
While I don’t mind seeing games such as bridge or chess make it, I wouldn’t at all expect to see the IOC draw the line with accepting the W. S. of Poker in, which relies primarily on probability of imperfect information rather than brute-force calculation.
Granted, if chess or bridge had on-line commentators that WSOP features on TV with bot calculations in the side menus, then maybe these games would also pick up some $$$ funding $$$ as well.
Instead of the ability to buy one’s way (maybe via a favourable seeding through previous sponsorship means at other casino funded tournaments) to a gold via a bluff or unsound gambit, strategic thought should be a dominant factor for determination of intellectual competition, as currently seems to be the main plan in games such as bridge & chess.
That said, perhaps one should reconsider to keep chess out of the IOC reaches, which are more likely to endorse sports where it seems to be technically legal within the sporting rules of certain sports to apply a lacrosse cross-check across a guy’s forehead, & only get the equivalent of a football five-yard penalty, as an old Cosby joke might’ve gone. Physical assault of an opponent, as in sports such as hockey, etc wonder why any athelete would tolerate this, but then again, most are already pumped full of horse testicle hormone that it would seem unconvetional to not enter the games without having one’s latest experimental pharmaceutical dosage of chemical flowing through one’s veins.
Do chess players really want to be pissing in a cup as well?!?! Let’s just fill ’em both up with vodka instead, name ’em Tchigorin, & let ’em play 1800’s style of quality chess – DRUNK!