When chess players from Azerbaijan refused to participate in the 1996 World Chess Olympiad to be held in Yerevan, the tournament didn’t suffer in terms of quality, because the time, as Vanik Zakaryan, a grandmaster and the honorary president of the Armenian Chess Federation, “there was no grandmaster in Azerbaijan in 1996 and their national team was an ordinary team. In Istanbul, when Azad Rahimov, the Azerbaijani Minister of Youth and Sports, said that they had had grandmasters, either he didn’t know or neglected the fact that the first chess player, Master of Sports of the USSR in Azerbaijan was an Armenian, Suren Abrahamyan, the first grandmaster (in 1978) was Vladimir Baghirov who was also of Armenian descent (Baghirov’s father Konstantin was an Armenian, his mother was a Ukrainian. – A.H.) and after that, Garry Kasparov (1980). And the first Azerbaijani grandmaster is Rajabov who got that title quite recently, in 2001,” V. Zakaryan told.
By the way, Vladimir Baghirov participated in the 1996 World Chess Olympiad in Yerevan as a member of the Latvian national team.
Ashot HAKOBYAN
