“We are bidding to host the Chess Olympiad this time. The event budget will be about Rs 75 crore,” Bharat Singh Chauhan, Secretary, AICF told IANS.
If India wins the bid then the Chess Olympiad will be the second major global chess competition that would be held in the country after 2013.
In 2013 the World Chess Championship was held between the then Defending Champion India’s V. Anand and the then Challenger Magnus Carlsen from Norway.
The Chess Olympiad is a biennial team event, in which teams from approximately 190 countries compete for two weeks.
The physical chess Olympiad was supposed to take place in Moscow from July 26 July to August 8.
However, on Friday, the International Chess Federation or FIDE decided to move the Chess Olympiad and all other official competitions planned from Russia.
The other events that are moved away from Russia are the first chess Olympiad for People with Disabilities and the 93rd FIDE Congress, FIDE said.
This year, the Congress should also include an electoral procedure, since the first term of the current FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich is coming to an end. Dvorkovich was elected in Batumi (Georgia), in September 2018.
FIDE is already working on finding alternative dates and locations for these events.
(Venkatachari Jagannathan can be reached at v.jagannathan@ians.in)
–IANS