THE CHESS Olympiad held biennially in different cities throughout the globe is not a tea party. It is the supreme contest of the chess world, the equivalent of the Olympics in the field of athletics, an event to which nations send their best players to seek the sport’s highest accolades. In light of this and the disappointing performance of T&T’s teams at this premier contest, including the recent event at Dresden, Germany, it seems somewhat necessary to examine, indeed to question candidly, the country’s raison d’etre for participating in this special event.

Indeed, if T&T is to benefit in any way from participation in the Olympiad it is through the yardstick it provides for assessing the chess playing strength of its best players over a span of several years and, as a result, gaining a reliable idea of where the sport is going. Anyone making an honest assessment based on these results will conclude, as DOUBLE ROOKS has already done, that the level of chess in T&T is really going nowhere. The critical problem is, who is really concerned about this?

The “achievements” of T&T’s men’s team in these contests give us little to crow about, but what the results say about the country’s women players is something so depressing that DOUBLE ROOKS is forced to question the very reason for sending them to this highly competitive international event. What could possibly be the motive? Is there a masochistic or perhaps a mysoginistic streak in the T&TCA that it enjoys sending a team of female players to the Olympiad as lambs to the slaughter? Or is it because such a nice trip to some famous city is available that the Association thinks it would be a good educational outing for them? Misguided sentimentality, in fact, seems to be the governing attitude.

The reason certainly cannot be based on the quality of their skill or the level of their performance. At Dresden, the T&T women’s team defeated Aruba and Pakistan whose players had no rating whatever and drew 2-2 with the mini-mini states of Macau and Malta. They failed to win or draw a single game against other opponents, Brazil, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Lebanon and Honduras. Of the 111 countries participating in the Women’s Section of the Olympiad, T&T took 107th place, ahead of Aruba, Kenya, Seychelles and Afghanistan.

Aditi Soondarsingh and Javanna Smith, the country’s top female players, each won three out of ten games, while <Joanne Rattan Chung> scored 2.5 and Lyndy-Ann Guiseppi 1.5 out of ten. Soondarsingh, rated 1867, performed at a rating of 1620. Smith, who recently zoomed to a rating of 2001 from a single tournament in Colombia, performed at a rating of 1642.

The fact is that the status of women’s chess in Trinidad and Tobago is yet to emerge out of its infancy. There are no functioning female chess clubs in the country; a couple years ago Petronilla Araujo made a valiant attempt to revive the Valkyries Chess Club but she never managed to attract the kind of support needed to actively maintain it. As far as competitions go, there is only one regular contest exclusively for women, the National Women’s Championship. And statistics of this event will show a somewhat limited participation, particularly when the event is held during the school term.

So why does the Association even think of sending a woman’s team to the Olympiad? And if so, what really are the criteria for selection? The fact is that none of the four who went to Dresden has ever achieved any notable success in any of the open contests held throughout the year. One player, in fact, is unknown as a participant on the open tournament circuit.

By comparison, Jamaica which climbed impressively to the 80th place in the Open section, fielded no women’s team at Dresden. Among the English-speaking Caribben participants, Barbados also left T&T behind by placing 118th in the Open and 95th in the Women’s section. If T&T’s female players cannot attain any kind of distinction in the open national championships or in any of the other open competitions at home, why are they being sent to contest this supreme international event? What then are the criteria, if any? And who is really making the selection?

Can the Association now say “we like it so,” or will it seriously consider changing the selection process here also; that is requiring female players to prove their worth in open tournaments at home before the country sends another team to the Olympiad as lambs to the slaughter.