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12/09/2009
Legendary Garry Kasparov has confirmed officially his arrival in Valencia the eve of the historical match of revenge against Anatoli Karpov, September 20th. Until that moment, he’ll continue being concentrate at his residence in Croatia, where he prepares his awaited return to the boards with a specific training.
The preparation of Kasparov consists in sessions of many daily hours in which, besides other things, he is specially insisting in the improving of the “explosive chess” for the semi-rapid and the blitz games, in which he is going to fight against his eternal rival. The ex World’s champion isn’t “as used to play as he was before”, although he says in a joking tone that he is convinced of “conserving some practice”. However, the Russian press affirms he’s fit, because of his hobby of playing on the internet and because he is the personal trainer of some world’s promising talents.
Unlike Karpov, who wanted to come to Valencia one week before the match, Kasparov has preferred to maintain the mystery of his public comeback until the last moment, although the organization of ‘Valencia, cuna del ajedrez moderno’ had offered him to come before. These are the acts which show the complete different thinking styles of both champions.
The return of Kasparov to the boards is having a very big repercussion, specially in Russia, whose media already count with more than a dozen of accreditations for members who will come to cover the event. Besides of being one sports character, he is a public figure in the field of Russian politics, because of its condition as opponent of the actual president, Vladimir Putin, who he will try to dismiss in the future.
After his official retirement from the chess competition at 2005, the one considered by lots of people as the best chess player in history, with more than 20 years being on the first place on the World’s ranking, hasn’t played too much with public, that’s why the organization first wasn’t sure if he was going to accept this invitation for an exhibition match. Nevertheless, he finally accepted, after arduous negotiations, because he was conscious of the attractiveness of the revenge and grateful for the opportunity of holding the 25th anniversary of the start of his legend against Karpov.
Besides this, and although the press, sympathizer of the Russian government, has made some insinuations of his possible retirement of politics, Kasparov is going to return to his activity as scourge of Putin. Before this, though, he is going to sign another page for sport’s history.
For finding an event in chess history, which could be compared to this one, we should remember 1992, when two other mythical chess players, American Bobby Fisher and Russian Boris Spassky, re-created the games played in Iceland for the World’s title 20 years before.
