The opening of the main chess event of the season – the world championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Boris Gelfand – is taking place at the State Tretyakov Gallery. The driving force behind staging this contest in Moscow and the main sponsor of the match, ANDREY FAILATOV, a shareholder in the N-Trans Group, told Kommersant’s correspondent ALEXEY DOSPEKHOV why he decided to invest money in chess and how he plans to change the economics of chess and link it to Russian art.
– I’m primarily interested, of course, in your motivation. Why finance a world championship chess match? Is it to boost your own image, a desire to help the sport you were very seriously involved in when you were young?
– A country that fights for all the major international events – the APEC summit, the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup, the Universiade – simply cannot ignore a competition which at one time was one of its main symbols. When Boris Gelfand, who was a student friend of mine, won the candidates’ tournament, he said that the venue for the match had not been decided yet, but there were various rumours going around that it would be either in India or somewhere else. It turned out that there had indeed been no application from Moscow, so I had a think and decided we had to try.
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| Click on photo to see Andrey Filatov's Forbes profile |
– On the contrary, I wasn’t sure we would win the right to host the match. But I could see that in any case one way or another there would be a winner. If Moscow’s bid failed, Boris Gelfand would earn a bigger prize fund, because the rival bid would have to beat it with money. And if it won, so much the better: the country would gain a serious competition that had not been staged here in the history of modern Russia. You’ll agree that’s a simple and understandable motive. Then it started to develop in terms of the current situation with chess, a new economics of chess, and the main points on which it could be based.
