- Dylan Loeb McClain, Does Women’s Chess Have a Problem?, The Huffington Post, March 5, 2017
Dylan Loeb McClain, former chess columnist for The New York Times and now writer-on-demand of World Chess, the official partner of FIDE, reviews the Women’s World Chess Championship Knockout Tournament that had just ended, with special regards as to the controversies that have accompanied it.
Among various amenities, such as the hijab issue (which indeed looks much more elegant than the Ku Klux Klan’s hood), he notes how the absence of the world’s women’s No. 1 侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán) may play an influential role in the future development agenda of the women’s chess movement. As it is well known, 侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán) disdained the knockout format, regarding it as unreasonably unpredictable and subjective, and asked to FIDE’s lawmakers to equate men’s and women’s World Chess Championship systems. FIDE officials, however, preferred to “defend the unpredictable” as a more appealing format to sponsors and audience. Furthermore, most of the chess élite showed very little interest in the gender equality issue, and raised their voice only against the mandatory Iranian dress code. With all due respect to such an argument, no wonder that the unpredictable ended up to be the only certainty. |
René Magritte, Shéhérazade, 1947. Photo courtesy of harpersbazaar.com
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