A day of chess

All eyes are on the Games in Paris, where an estimated 10,000 athletes from more than 200 nations will compete. This comes 100 years after the Paris Olympics of 1924, a milestone event when the number of competing nations jumped from 29 to 44.

That same year, Fide, the international governing body of chess, (Federation Internationale des Echecs) was founded in the 9th arrondissement’s town hall by Pierre Vincent, the secretary of the French Chess Federation. An unofficial chess Olympiad took place alongside the athletic Olympics, though the first official Fide Olympiad was not until 1927. Those were sympathetic times for international cooperation – the League of Nations was founded at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920.

And so, in 2024, Fide comes to mark its own centenary. They shovelled out some corporate guff with ten goals for the next 100 years, and I fell asleep after reading the first three: ‘Global expansion and accessibility’, ‘Digital revolution’ and ‘Educational integration’.