Successes will never be replicated

The last checkmate?
By DAVID HOROVITZ
10/22/2010 05:16

Israeli chess captain Alon Greenfeld is sadly convinced that Israel’s successes will never be replicated.

Alon Greenfeld is rightly ecstatic about the remarkable performances the Israeli national team has put in at the last two Chess Olympiads – the chess world’s most prestigious team tournaments, with a rich history dating back to the 1920s.

It’s true, the Jews are astoundingly over-represented in the pantheon of world chess greats, and today’s Israel is no chess-playing minnow. But on paper, the Jewish state could not reasonably have been expected to get near the medal podium at either Dresden, Germany 2008 or Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia 2010. Instead, it is the only country to have won a medal at both events – coming third to Ukraine, with Russia in second, this time, and losing out to Armenia, with the US in third place, two years ago.

Flush with that Russian success when I interviewed him at his Ra’anana home, Greenfeld, the non-playing captain, raved about the contributions of all five players in the national team – each of whom, he said, had produced something special at a critical moment in one match or other to help pave the way to success. Boris Gelfand, the team’s strongest player, excelled. But the second strongest, Emil Sutovsky, emerged as the tournament’s best overall performer, and everyone else – Ilia Smirin, Maxim Rodshtein and Victor Mikhalevski – played a vital part.

Israel really shouldn’t have had a chance, especially after, early in the tournament, it could only tie with the relatively weak Indonesians and then lost to host Russia’s third side. But the fantastic collective spirit pulled the team through, he said. And a constructive “collective spirit” in chess, which is an utterly individual sport, he elaborated, is a rare and precious commodity indeed. There was an almost “euphoric” readiness to give everything for the team in Russia, Greenfeld exalted, an all-for-one and one-for-all mindset that saw Israel reel off an improbable sequence of five straight victories, several against very strong nations like Holland, Hungary and the US, to claim the bronze spot.

Local headlines from the tournament focused largely on Yemen’s refusal to play against Israel – a no-show that gave the team an automatic first round victory. That early unearned win didn’t particularly help; it meant the players had no easy match in which to get acclimatized. Far more worryingly, it exposed the ongoing anti-Israeli politics that the international chess authorities allow to afflict the sport, he said – a virus that reached its height in 2004, when the authorities selected Libya to host the individual world championships and, entirely predictably but utterly disgracefully, Israel players were unable to participate.

Greenfeld, a friendly, passionate man who talks with me in his garden while intermittently trying to restrain his big, boisterous English sheepdog Oliver, has fumed impotently for years about the tolerance for anti-Israel arm-twisting by Arab nations in world chess.

He’s even more upset, though, by his inability to make headway, either, in combating what he sees as the inadequate way Israel handles its chess players – unique assets who, he says, have over the years won more medals and championships for the country than any other sport, and yet who are given desultory levels of funding. Increasingly, he says, the top players are resorting to coaching, usually overseas, in order to support themselves. Three of the five Olympiad stars are now headed in that direction. And he won’t be able to pick them, by definition, he says, if their main focus is on helping others rather than playing and improving their own game.

His solution: The nation’s top 10 or so players should be paid a moderate salary, which would include an obligation to make themselves available for international team tournaments. It’s an enviable opening gambit by an astute chess tactician, but Greenfeld has been around for long enough on the local chess scene to know he has little chance of winning this particular game.

Here is the full article.