Can a female athlete have it all?

Dominic Lawson: Even a genius can’t have it all – if she’s a woman
Tuesday, 13 September 2011

She wanted a life that allowed her to be a good mother and to have hobbies and pastimes, in other words to enjoy a whole world unconnected to chess

So has biology reasserted itself? Last weekend the extraordinary Hungarian Judit Polgar, by a yawning chasm far and away the strongest woman chess player in history, was knocked out of the game’s World Cup. Yet Judit, now a 35-year-old mother of two, had got as far as the quarter-final round of the world championship eliminating tournament in the sub-arctic Russian city of Khanty-Mansiysk, beating a series of her male rivals in matches of increasing tension and difficulty. Finally, on Sunday, her epic run was halted by the reigning Russian chess champion, Peter Svidler.

As with more physical competitions, such as athletics or football, chess is divided into male and female events. Judit Polgar, however, has been unique in refusing to take any part in the latter. There would simply be little point, so large is the gulf between her and other women. Thus she told the British magazine Chess in August, when asked if she might enter the Women’s World Championship: “I have never competed for it and wasn’t really interested.”

Judit is also unique in being the result of an educational experiment. Her father, the psychologist Laszlo Polgar, had a theory that what we call genius is in fact merely a form of learned behaviour, rather than any innate gift. He proposed to prove this, supported by his wife Clara, with any children that they had. Chess, which is widely thought to be a touchstone of the intellect, would be the conduit; and because they then produced three girls, the experiment would be especially telling, since there had never been any acknowledged female chess geniuses.

As Judit puts it: “Practically from the moment of my birth, I became involved in an educational experiment. Even before I came into the world, my parents had already decided: I would be a chess player.” Lazlo Polgar appeared to prove his point: as a result of his intensive home coaching, all three of his daughters achieved remarkable playing strength at an early age – and Judit, the third daughter, beat Bobby Fischer’s record to become, at 15 years and four months, the youngest person ever to attain the title of international grandmaster.

I visited the Polgars’ home in Budapest, in the middle of this “experiment”, when Judit was 11 years old. When I asked to play a game of chess against her, she insisted that she would only do so without sight of the board or pieces. So I stared at her ponytails, while this little girl called out the moves which demolished my position. When I then challenged her to a game of table-tennis, she annihilated me at that too, a defeat all the more humiliating because her head barely rose above the height of the table. She was, and is, a ferocious competitor, a psychological attribute that is quite separate from purely intellectual ability. As the former US chess champion Joel Benjamin reported after playing her: “It was all-out war for five hours. I was totally exhausted. She absolutely has a killer instinct.”

Full article here.