Beating a “neutral” Russian – how a 10-year-old Ukrainian chess player from Truskavets won the world championship.
Ukrainian Oleksii Nakonechnyi, who won a triumphant victory at the U10 World Rapid Chess Championship in Albania, beat, among others, a “star” chess player from Russia.
The boy defeated the Russian champion from Kalmykia, who competed in the championship under the FIDE flag, Ihor Nakonechnyi, the father of the Ukrainian chess player, told:
“In this tournament, we had to play with a hostile country, and there lives a boy who is predicted to win the world championship and is called the greatest talent of our time in chess among the young.
I knew that sooner or later we would meet him. We had been preparing for this meeting for a long time, both psychologically and technically. I believed to the end that we would win. And we beat him in great style,” says the father of the Ukrainian champion.
Ihor Nakonechnyi recalls that he and his son were dissuaded from participating in the championship, but they decided to fight for the victory:
“You know, the president of the World Chess Federation is a Russian, Arkady Dvorkovich. By all means, they are dragging them to international competitions under a “neutral” flag…
Many people said: “Don’t go, because the Russians will be there.” I told them that we had already given them too much, and we had to go and take it back from them. If it wasn’t for Oleksiy, the guy from Russia would have been the first, and now he’s the second,” Ihor Nakonechnyi recalls.
