Nobody could doubt Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s devotion to chess. As president of the impoverished Russian republic of Kalmykia, he spent £60m building a Chess City where visitors could play in comfort. He made the game compulsory in schools and had a giant chess board with outsized pieces placed in the main square of his capital.
His flamboyant style as head of the world chess federation since 1995 has attracted frequent criticism, however; and the impression of eccentricity was compounded recently when he told Russian state television that aliens in yellow spacesuits had given him a tour of their craft.
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