One of the best chess players in the world was banned from a tournament for refusing to switch out his
pair of jeans:
five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen arrived at the upscale Cipriani Wall Street, host of this year’s World Rapid Chess Championship, wearing something organizers considered utterly inappropriate. He was sporting a pair of jeans.
To FIDE, the game’s world governing body, this was as unacceptable as moving a pawn three spaces.
Denim, FIDE said, is “explicitly prohibited under longstanding regulations for this event” and promptly fined Carlsen, one of the greatest chess players of all time, $200 for his infraction. When the chief arbiter requested that Carlsen change his clothes, he declined to do so. And as a result, the 34-year-old grandmaster from Norway wasn’t assigned a match in the following round. It was chess’s equivalent of a one-game suspension.
Carlsen responded by quitting the tournament altogether—and then pulling out of the World Blitz Chess Championship, too.
“At that point, it became a bit of a matter of principle for me,” he said in an interview on his Take Take Take chess platform. “I’m too old at this point to care too much.”
Carlsen added that he’d been returning from a lunch meeting and barely had time to go back to his room, where he put on a shirt and jacket. He even threw on a different, dressier pair of shoes. But once the arbiter warned him about changing his trousers, Carlsen decided he’d had enough. Instead of arguing about pants, he figured he might as well spend his New Year’s somewhere warmer than freezing New York.
There are some people who are bigger than their sport. Tiger Woods, at his peak, was bigger than golf. Magnus Carlsen is bigger than chess. FIDE would be wise to consider that power dynamic when it seeks to assert its authority over a trivial matter like wearing blue jeans.
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