Word: ilyumzhinov
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story of Ilyumzhinov's rise to power reads like a James Bond movie scripted by Vladimir Nabokov. Like many other chess players, Ilyumzhinov was a prodigy. At 9 he was the chess champion of his native Kalmykia, a tiny, impoverished Russian republic populated by the descendants of Genghis Khan. But his talents went beyond pushing pawns. In his 20s he made millions running a string of banks in the early wildcat years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism. At the tender age of 31 the dapper Ilyumzhinov (he has a fondness for white capes and vintage Rolls-Royces) was elected President...
...Ilyumzhinov took over the presidency of the venerable Federation Internationale des Echecs, FIDE for short, which curates the rules of chess and tabulates the world rankings. He immediately set out to reshape the sport in his own image. In an attempt to make chess more sponsor friendly, he compressed the traditional two-year championship schedule into a more dramatic three-week tournament. He sweetened the pot with liberal infusions of cash from his deep pockets and sped up the game clock, discarding the time-honored classical chess format, in which players spend hours elaborating intricate moves, in favor of rapid...
...Ilyumzhinov also launched a campaign to make chess an Olympic sport, a process that will involve, as per International Olympic Committee regulations, mandatory drug testing. In Kalmykia's capital city of Elista, he erected a $30 million chess coliseum called Chess City, a bizarre extravagance in a place where hot water is still a luxury. Last spring he staged a fashion show featuring flirty chess uniforms modeled by Alexandra Kosteniuk, a curvaceous grandmaster who may be the chess world's answer to Anna Kournikova. Kosteniuk then proceeded to play eight simultaneous matches. On Rollerblades...
...Apparently, in order to save chess, it must be destroyed," American grandmaster Yasser Seirawan observes wryly. Ilyumzhinov, naturally, takes a different view. "All is quiet in the chess kingdom," he says. "Everything is clearly structured. Everything is predictable and runs smoothly...
...every sports commissioner needs his Michael Jordan, and the game's only superstar isn't playing along. Garry Kasparov, ranked No. 1 in the world for the past 17 years, has called Ilyumzhinov's version of the game "the end of chess as we know it" and urged his fellow grandmasters to boycott FIDE events. "If the leading players do not organize themselves soon," Kasparov told TIME, "classical chess will all but disappear." (Ilyumzhinov, for his part, has called Kasparov "unbalanced...