FIDE Tries to Gain Olympic Berth for ChessThe International Chess Federation (FIDE) will hold two high-profile exhibition matches during the Sydney Games in a bid to show that the sport deserves to enter the Olympic family.Those two matches, which will be held at the Olympic Athletes Village in Sydney, "are aimed to speed up the process of chess being incorporated into the Olympic Games," FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov told Xinhua Thursday. Ilyumzhinov said the first match will feature a cross-sex battle between men's world champion Alexander Khalifman and women's world champion Xie Jun, who will take the showdown through the Internet, while the second will be played between world number three Viswanathan Anand of India and world number four Alexei Shirov. The FIDE president, who came to China for the opening ceremony of the first chess World Cup, said the dispute about the chess's status as a sport has been the biggest hurdle for the sport to enter the Olympic Games. But Ilyumzhinov was confident that chess will grow into a sport with the biggest number of population as playing chess on the Internet is becoming a fashion. "More than 700 million people can play chess in the world. Now more and more people are playing chess on the Internet, which will redouble the number of the chess players. "You can play chess on the Internet but you can not do the same thing with basketball and football," joked the president. |
| People's Daily Online --- http://www.peopledaily.com.cn/english/ |