Chess grandmaster sacked for saying chess ‘perhaps not for ladies’ when commentating on girls’s occasion

A chess commentator has been sacked for making sexist remarks throughout the protection of a high girls’s match. 

Throughout a stay broadcast of the FIDE Ladies’s Grand Prix occasion in Kazakhstan, the Belarusian-born Israeli grandmaster Ilya Smirin admitted to saying chess is “perhaps not for ladies”.

“I did not say it overtly,” he instructed his co-commentator, Ladies’s Worldwide Grasp Fiona Steil-Antoni.

“It was a non-public dialog.”

Steil-Antoni responded by reminding him of an earlier comment through which he’d praised a girl for “taking part in like a person”.

“Yeah, it is true,” Smirin stated.

“She’s taking part in in model — positional model. A really robust endgame.”

Smirin’s feedback provoked criticism from a number of high feminine gamers.

“Shockingly unacceptable!” stated former Ladies’s World Champion Susan Polgar.

“Swift motion should be taken earlier than the subsequent recreation.”

Two-time US Ladies’s Champion Jennifer Shahade stated it was “gross to see such sexism within the broadcast for a girls’s occasion”.

The Worldwide Chess Federation (FIDE) issued a press release on Wednesday night time (AEST), describing the feedback as “very embarrassing”. 

“Though we’ve got nice respect for Grandmaster Ilya Smirin as a chess participant, the views he expressed on air are fully unacceptable, offensive, and don’t signify any of the values that FIDE stands for,” it stated.

“Due to this fact we unreservedly apologise to all those that had been offended.”

FIDE stated Smirin had been stood down from his commentary duties with speedy impact.

“FIDE not solely strives to extend girls’s illustration in skilled sports activities and official positions but additionally to alter the notion of chess as purely a males’s world,” it stated.

“Our neighborhood must be a spot the place girls really feel secure and revered.”