I simply hated this Olympiad for a multitude of reasons which were probably mainly subjective and perhaps unique to me? Though subsequently I have talked to various other people about this Olympiad and been surprised by the generally unflattering comments about it.
Nevertheless I think it is actually not hard to understand that, for many other people, this was a most enjoyable Olympiad, and it is true that there were many positive aspects to the event.
Indeed I had a couple of good/crazy nights out with some of the other members of the Irish delegation which proved to be very memorable. This was perhaps best summed up by the occasion most of the players didn't make it back from a night out until around 0630 in the morning, and even then it was only to arrive back to the bar just across from the "Olympic village" which incredibly was still open when we got back.
Just for me this was not a happy Olympiad overall and I ended up leaving early [after having arrived three days after the start of the event- for last minute work reasons] after becoming ill during the tournament which was a very unusual and odd sort of feeling. I had a bad leg infection which required anti inflammatory drugs duly prescribed by the two doctors that team captain Joel had sent to see me.
Really though, it was only the nail in the coffin of my whole stay, as it was truly one big nightmare in which so many things put me in bad form and made me wish I had never accepted my place on the team.
Chief among my pet hates for this Olympiad was the accommodation. I never seen anything like it at an Olympiad and I have been to a few! Worse still was the fact that I along with one member of the Irish delegation had actually chosen to pay extra to get a single room as opposed to possibly/probable sharing. Something like 400 Euros plus extra! Which as it happens turned out to be a complete waste. Basically the accommodation was totally basic and the living conditions less than that. Below is a sample picture of what it was like.
As can be seen from the photos, it was to say the least depressing to be going back to that everyday. At least I had brought my speakers and could chill out with plenty of music. The walls were like paper apparently as it seems others next door were able to hear this. Though nobody actually complained to me about it. The one good thing about the rooms was indeed that the acoustics were excellent for listening to music.
Other than meeting up with the rest of the lads in the evenings and maybe getting drunk(or merry) as heck, it was a pretty terrible experience to be stuck in this "olympic village" especially when in more recent times I have viewed chess as a holiday and liked the normal holiday experiences. Compare the sort of accommodation I got used to, in for example my trips to Thailand, and you can see why it felt so miserable to be in this awful "olympic village".
Even allowing for the different nature of the two events it is comical to consider how bad the accommodation was in Turin. However, then there was the playing venue itself. Sure it was actually very nice inside, and very big with lots and lots of space. Indeed when you included all the other events taken place under the same roof it was huge actually! Below are some as of yet unpublished photos of the venue from me and pictures of some the Irish in action.
The main problem with this venue was that it was so far away from the accommodation that it required the players walk for about a half a mile with really hot temperature's of 25 and 32 degrees centigrade. Though as usual some people did manage to get lifts if they were officials or knew somebody. Still I saw the likes of Ivanchuck, Short and many others have to follow the crowds as they all made their way to the venue on mass around the same time each day.
The routine for meals was not very good either as although the food was generally not bad everything was done on the cheap so there was no cold drinks unless you wanted pay about 2 Euros for a can. Stocking up with food items or drink was not much use either as there was no place to put them in your accommodation, though I did hear that Korchnoi actually bought a fridge? Easy to see why the bar on the corner across from the "olympic village" was so popular.
Nevertheless while things were going awful for me on the chessboard I did have the chance to see plenty of the city. Generally the days were the best part when you were not playing, as with the free transport pass we were given, we could explore Turin at our leisure. As my performance was so bad I had a lot of free days, which was just as well because if nothing else I could at least enjoy exploring and seeing what Turin itself had to offer. Quite a lot as it turns out! Check out some of the photos I took below and you can get a bit of a feel for the city.
A few times I made good use of the free travel pass and made sure I got lost trying different routes and see where they might take me. You also get to see the real life and heartbeat of a city when you use public transport so I enjoyed this greatly. Of course compared to Dublin the transport system was fantastic. One of the great pleasures of this city was riding around on the public transport system and stopping to eat in some place or other and just walk around and wander through the streets.
One of my favorite routines was to have ice cream from the ice cream parlour beside the bus stop at least twice a day. Once going into town and then when you got back later in the evening. This was no ordinary ice cream, here they take it very seriously and the taste and variety was simply wonderful. A few times I went out for the day sightseeing and did not return till it was dark. The venue was so awkward to get to that it was just too much of a hassle to bother going there at all.
So the only times I really would see the rest of the lads would be if I was playing or in a bar at night. Usually this involved watching Mark Heidenfeld and Alexander Baburin do battle with each other over the backgammon board. I think they are addicted to it this game! Meanwhile the rest of us got tanked up before we went on downtown to some of the more lively spots.
Mark Quinn being fluent in Italian was a great help and he was like an unofficial tour guide for much of the time. On at least one occasion he was able to bring Brian Kelly, Sam Collins and myself to some very fashionable nightclubs (apparently). Of course I had to mildly rebuke Brian and Sam a couple of times for not being more pro active and quicker to engage with the local talent, because although compared to them I am an old man, I would despair to think of the opportunities they were passing by or overlooking. Such complacency could not be said of the debonair Mark who more than once was able to use his language skills to make some introductions for all of us.
Well aside from these pleasant distractions things were pretty awful! Other problems that affected me had included my laptop not working and all my chess stuff being rendered obsolete. Normally I have lots of back up gear like two or three hard drives with fully working and ready to go operating systems that require only a 3-5 minute swapping of the drive if something really bad goes wrong. Here however the problem was that the power supply pin inside the laptop broke. A real disaster! So once the battery was dead there was actually nothing I could do.
Then on one of the free days then ICU Chairman Eamonn Pitts turned up and he and I decided to spend the day sightseeing together, but in a lazy and very relaxed sort of way. We wandered around and saw quite a lot, stopping at various points to get some light refreshments. During the course of this ambling around the town our conversations managed to cover history, philosophy, culture and politics and thats just to start with. It is one of the great things about being on holiday, you can relax and without a care in the world take it all in enjoy what life has to offer.
The streets of Turin are certainly worth a stroll in. There are so many beautiful squares and during the Olympiad they were decorated with giant chess sets and all sorts of chess activities Below are some photos of these with various other photos of Turin. Here below, we see one of Eamonn in the main square.
Also, seen as I was sort of in the market for a laptop I decided on a bit of an impulse to buy one in Turin on this very day that I was with Eamonn. He was somewhat amused by my impulse purchasing but patient while I tried to get the best deal in a high street shop. Well in the end these things are all pretty much about the same the world over. The only drawback was that when I got the laptop back to the room later that day and went to change the hard drives this laptop would not accept the hard drives I brought with me. This meant I was stuck with a laptop that had an operating system in Italian which was basically no use to me!
This in turn meant that I now had still no chess program for preparation so the next day I bought Fritz 9 and so I could at least access my database through that. It made little odds as I was playing chess so badly that after getting a very easy game as Black in one round by playing very correctly as Black in a G3 Sicilian I incredibly made a most absurd blunder that lost an otherwise drawn ending. Then in what turned out to be my last chance for some sort of redemption I outplayed an IM from New Zealand effortlessly from the opening only to make a couple of huge blunders in the later part of the middle game and ended up losing in a very odd and embarrassing manner.
That was the last chess I played at the 2006 Olympiad and I was glad to be back in Dublin soon after. After all the heat and discomfort combined with my feeling so unwell in general I opted to get the heck out of there and just go home! I was clearly no use whatsoever to the team and explained this to most of them, as and when I got the chance just before I did finally leave. They were very understanding and cool about it. We also saw the funny side of it so it was a case of, boy oh boy was I glad to get back to Dublin.
I soon was able to fix the new Italian laptop up with a proper operating system and I am writing on it now! So at least something good came from this Turin Olympiad for me. As for Turin itself? Well I will probably go back some day, as I did like the city quite a bit.
