The 64 - Should Chess Be In The Olympics?

It was once the norm where the Winter and Summer Olympics both took place in the same calendar year, as opposed to bi-annually which is the tradition we have recently become accustomed to. But thanks to the no longer not so novel Coronavirus delaying every major event the last couple of years, this is once against the case as the 2020 Summer Olympics recently wrapped up in August 2021 and the 2022 Winter Olympics are currently in full swing this February 2022. A bit confusing isn't it? Kind of like the recent Chess World Championship which was held in November 2021 as part of the Dubai 2020 Expo, proving the hypothesis that time these last two years has somehow both lagged and accelerated simultaneously. 

So with it being an Olympic year (although technically not the same calendar year) I figured it's as good a time as ever to revisit the aged-old question, "Should Chess be in the Olympics?"

In order to do this, there are three main matters that we need to assess. 

1. What is a sport?
2. Is chess a sport?
3. How does a sport become an Olympic sport?

1. What Is A Sport?

In the famous 1964 case regarding obscenity, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote, and I paraphrase:

"I can't define it...though I know it when I see it." 

I'm assuming most of you reading this watch or play sports in some capacity, and although we may not be able to clearly define what is a sport or what constitutes a sport, we can easily proclaim if something is a sport or not. For many reasons, chess seems to fall into a gray area in this regard. No matter which side you fall on, whether you think it's an overly worshipped board game or a physically taxing battle of intelligence, it's not completely farfetched to understand where the opposing side is coming from. 

But don't tell this to the Sport Accord Federation, who have gone out of their way to comprehensively provide the definitive definition of what constitutes a sport. Here are their main points.

• There should be an element of competition.
• Should not rely on equipment that is provided by a single supplier.
• Should not rely on any "luck" element specifically designed into the sport.  

I'd like to delve deepest into the third bullet point,which seems to be a direct dig at the game of poker. Chess is often juxtaposed with poker and to some extent there are certainly comparisons, but by the definition of the Sport Accord Federation, this is a false equivalency. 

Chess is a game with no unknown variables.

In poker, you don't know your opponent's hand and there are additional cards added to the game on a random basis. The most dramatic moment of any Texas Hold' Em tournament is when the players have all their chips in the pot only to have one player suck out on the river.

It makes for great television undoubtedly but one player did everything right only to be handicapped by it because of bad luck. If I'm hitting top pair on every flop, there's a good chance that I can beat any poker player in the world. This is not the case with chess. World Champion Magnus Carlsen can purely beat me just by pushing his h-pawn. This bleeds into our second main query of this essay -

2. Is Chess a Sport?

This unknown variable mentioned in the previous section is exactly what makes chess viable as a sport and disqualifies poker and other board games that rely on cards or dice because these amusements always entail an element of luck. For my money, chess checks all the boxes catalogued by the Sport Accord Federation. 

Ok, but what about Physical Exertion? "My definition of sports are when big burly men bludgeon and sweat all over each other."

In fact, the Oxford dictionary defines the term front and center as -

"An activity involving physical exertion..."

This always seems to be the most damning counterargument to the question asked and I get it. Anything you can do while sitting comfortably for hours at a time enjoying a hot cup of tea doesn't seem physically exalting, but that certainly doesn't mean that chess isn't taxing, specifically on the mind (and therefore, as a result, the body).

Now, as a retort to this argument, this is the part of the article where I predictably echo the famous thesis of Robert M. Sopalsky, who has become etched into the annals of chess lore forever after he concluded that -

"A Chess Player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day."

I actually purchased a copy of Sopalsky's New York Times Bestseller Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst. I read half of it before realizing that it wasn't an oral history of the making of the first Austin Powers movie.

With the exception of the importance of correct motoric activity, chess is by almost every single account a sport. Obviously a rook lift with two fingers is not even comparable to pulling out the old 3-Wood and sinking a double-eagle from 210 yards away but this is the lone exception and not the only absolute factor when categorizing sport or not a sport. And even if you disagree and can't get past the idea that you're simply parked at a table and not playing with a ball, do you know who else recognizes chess as a sport? That's right, the International Olympic Committee. So then -

3. How Does A Sport Become An Olympic Sport?

Were you watching the recent World Championship between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi and wondering what's wrong with the dang Russian flag? Well that's because in 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned Russia from all international sporting competitions after the 2014 Russian doping scandal, serendipitously exposed and captured on film in the great Academy Award winning 2017 documentary Icarus. Therefor, the world championship falls under the restrictions of the World Anti-Doping Agency and Nepo was forced to don the banner of the Chess Federation of Russia, the same goes for Olympic athletes who for consecutive Olympic games now have technically represented The Russian Olympic Committee and not their homeland of Russia.

So it seems that the Olympics have had direct consequences in the chess world, the IOC recognizes chess as a sport... but then why the hell has chess never had the chance to partake in any of the Olympic games? Why draw the line just shy of the 64 squares? It's not as if the Olympics are an exemplary model on deciding what sports are eligible to compete for Gold. There's a long and unreliable history of awarding medals to some "sports" who's rightful home belongs on ESPN 8, The Ocho, as opposed to the international stage.

Such events include Sports Climbing, Croquet, Water Skiing, Korfball, Gliding, Ballooning, Tug of War, Motorboating and even Live Pigeon Shooting!

Not to mention how you feel about some of the most recent Olympics essentially becoming the stage for a glorified version of the X-Games, with skateboarding and surfing being added to the latest fold.

So why these sports and not chess? 

It's obviously a complicated process but ultimately the IOC oversees all aspects of the Olympic Games and is in charge of deciding which sports will or won't be included. It's an elite committee comprised of 99 members who hail from all over the world. An executive board proposes which sports will be included and then all the remaining representatives vote on it based on a certain criteria that must be met. 

This list of criteria is a lengthy one but it basically factors down to 4 key components. 

• How much value the sport would add to the Olympics legacy?
• How long the sport has existed?
• How popular the sport is in the host country?
• How much it would cost to broadcast the events?

I feel like most of these quandaries answer themselves. Chess is the "Immortal Game" and has literally existed for a millennia now. It's a game that has passed into every city in the world and along more than 1,500 years of continuous history - a common thread of pawn chains, knight forks and humiliating checkmates that would run through the lives of Karl Marx, Pope Leo XIII, Abraham Lincoln, Voltaire and most recently Super Bowl quarterback Joe Burrow. Surely a sport with such an illustrious and vast history would add an unassailable value to the Olympic's prestigiousness.

Regarding the other point of how much would it cost to broadcast a chess event, well it seems as though everyone and their grandmother is streaming on twitch these days. Theoretically, all it takes is a Zoom ID number, a DGT board and an announcer pretending like they're not using Stockfish to influence their analysis. Now, I would obviously expect a slight more pageantry and professionalism if chess were to be covered in the Olympics. Very similar to what Chess24 does with their high tech Oslo studio for the Meltwater Tour. It's always a well produced show and out of all the broadcasts on Youtube, it's the program that resembles the most to that of a traditional live sporting event.

But I'd like to imagine a broadcast booth with Garry Kasparov, Vishy Anand and Judit Polgár all busting each other's balls kind of like whatever they're doing over there on TNT for the NBA and NHL games.

I think whatever happens, after the most recent chess World Championship (or the "Hess World Hampionship") we all can agree in that we cannot entrust the task of Olympic commentary to the shenanigans of Danny Rensch and the chess.com staff... 

The main bullet point though worth discussing is how popular the sport is in the host country. One would figure that if chess was excluded from the Sochi Winter Olympics back in 2014, well then there's really no hope for the game to ever be included, as chess is essentially Russia's past time and their babies come out of the womb rated 2000 in classical.

However, there is still hope after all. In 2019, a campaign was launched for chess to be represented in the upcoming 2024 games in Paris, France, a nation with a long history of chess being engraved into the country's DNA; from Napoleon Bonaparte to Alexander Alekhine and MVL, to the famous Café de la Régence, a dingy bistro where in the 18th century the most ambitious chess players met, eventually evolving into the undisputed epicenter of the chess universe.

But there's one major difference between Sochi 2014, from when that campaign kicked off back in 2019 and chess as we know it today...and that's that The Queen's Gambit miniseries didn't exist yet. Hopefully with the recent chess boom, the rising popularity of the game and the fact that NBC, who recently aired recaps of the FIDE Chess World Championship, also has the rights to the Olympics. It's quite possible that the IOC will finally realize the potential that chess has to offer.

And let's say chess is including in the 2024 Paris games. I'm sure many don't care if chess makes the Olympics because there's the Chess Olympiad, which is a clear substitute for the Olympics. However, that's only a team event. The International Sports Federation (IF) and the IOC may admit an activity in one of three ways. As a sport; as a discipline, which is a branch of a sport; or as an event, which is a competition within a discipline. So unlike the Olympiad, there's a plethora of opportunity to handout several medals through a variety of disciplines or events. Not only can there be an overall team event but there can be an individual event, maybe something similar to the World Cup format. Of course there's also different time variants, where the Olympics can offer medals in Rapid and Blitz. How about mixed teams, mixed doubles or maybe even 960 and other variants? I've never seen atomic chess played over the board before!?

So what say you? If you were the chairperson of the IOC, how would you organize chess in the Olympics? What events would you like to see crammed into the allotted two week time-frame?

As well as what are some other sports you would like to see included or removed from the Olympics. I'm of the mind of having everything be in the games; chess, poker, bowling, beer pong. You name it, there should be a gold medal for it. All of this is obviously a broad topic with a lot of details and circumstances, so with the intention of limiting this to just a blog post and not a 1,000 page Russian novel, there's a lot that was left out. So feel free to tell me what you think and I look forward to continuing this discussion in the comments below. 

I also did a fair bit of research on this matter and I don't intend to pass all the knowledge off as my own, so with that being said, I will cite all my sources to give proper credit where credit is due. 

WORKS CITED

29, GM Noël Studer on November. “Is Chess a Sport?” Next Level Chess By GM Noël Studer, 6 Nov. 2021, https://nextlevelchess.blog/is-chess-a-sport/.

By The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “How Are Sports Chosen for the Olympics?” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/story/how-are-sports-chosen-for-the-olympics.

Kumar, Aishwarya. “The Grandmaster Diet: How To Lose Weight While Barely Moving.” ESPN, ESPN Internet Ventures, 27 Apr. 2020, https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmasters-magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-lose-weight-playing-chess.

McCluskey, Megan. “What Is the Roc? Why Russia Can't Compete at the 2022 Winter Olympics.” Time, Time, 3 Feb. 2022, https://time.com/6084195/what-is-roc-olympics/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc&utm_campaign=newsletter%2Binside-time-saturday%2Bdefault%2Bac&utm_content=%2B%2B%2B20220205%2B%2B%2Bbody&et_rid=87473020&lctg=87473020.

Pruitt-Young, Sharon. “Here's How the Olympics Decide What Sports to Include - and Which to Leave Out.” NPR, NPR, 28 July 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/tokyo-olympics-live-updates/2021/07/28/1021713829/how-the-olympics-decide-what-sports-to-include.

Doggers, Peter. “Chess Put Forward to Join Paris 2024 Olympic Games.” Chess.com, Chess.com, 13 Feb. 2019, https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-put-forward-to-join-paris-2024-olympic-games.

Shenk, David. “Introduction - Benjamin Franklin's Opera.” The Immortal Game: A History of Chess: Or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain, Anchor Books, New York, NY, 2007, pp. 4–95.