Sport
“No flag is still a flag”: Eliza Muratbekova
Irad's best chess player plays under the FIDE flag because her federation is not a member. She has turned down Kazakhstan and Russia, and she teaches children in the room where she learned.
From the Irad Times of 3 March 2022.
On the scoresheets of the Asian championships, Eliza Muratbekova's name stands beside the flag of FIDE, the world chess federation: a grey board with no country on it. The Irad Chess Federation is not a member of FIDE, so Irad's best player has no flag to play under. “No flag is still a flag,” she says. “Everyone in the hall knows where I am from.”
Ms. Muratbekova, 30, learned the game at the Kobozev Pioneers' Palace chess school in Nurzhan and became a Woman Grandmaster in 2013. She plays at Olympiads and Asian events, and she still teaches at the Pioneers' Palace, three afternoons a week, in the room where she learned.
The offers
Twice she has been offered a federation. In 2014 Kazakhstan asked her to play for its team, and in 2018 a Russian club offered her a contract that came with Russian citizenship. She refused both. “If I play for Kazakhstan, Irad is a province of Kazakhstan on the scoresheet,” she said. “If I play for nobody, Irad is a question. I would rather be a question.”
Not everyone in Irad agrees. Wrestlers and boxers who have taken Kazakh or Kyrgyz citizenship to compete point out that they had no other way to reach a world championship. She does not criticise them. “A wrestler has ten years. A chess player has fifty,” she said. “I can afford to wait.”
IradOne Sport shows her results with the Iradi flag beside her name. FIDE's lists never do.
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