Not many people in the hotel where the FIDE delegates stay are lawyers. But every single one of them is.
Nobody went to law school. Nobody had to. You survive three FIDE election cycles and you come out with a degree in sports law. I'm told the same thing happens in prison: you don't arrive a lawyer, but after a few years everyone on the block can recite the criminal code. By evening drinks I'd had ten qualified conversations about sports law and none about chess. One was about a chess player, but only as a witness.
The docket, all of it strictly allegedly:
Zurab Azmaiparashvili, president of the European Chess Union, has switched sides and gone with Wadim Rosenstein. The European federations, who elected Zurab in a landslide only recently and probably did not expect him to use the office to back a candidate in the FIDE election, did not get angry. Anger is for amateurs. They got procedural, which is grandmaster level, and are now considering an extraordinary general assembly.
Several federations plan to challenge Pavel Kolobkov's nomination as vice president. Then his election. Then the ruling on the challenge. In chess you resign; in FIDE you appeal. Kolobkov, I should add, is an Olympic fencing champion and a former Russian sports minister. If he does get elected, he will need to pick up some chess-legal vocabulary fast.
Rosenstein, one of the presidential candidates, says on social media that he has filed at CAS against Timur Turlov over the interpretation of the FIDE Charter.
In the VIP room at the Olympiad, I get a quick briefing on a defamation suit by Turlov against David Llada, FIDE's former PR director, who erroneously claimed that Turlov had misled the world about giving up his Russian citizenship. The respondent is a few metres away, having some fruit. He is here because he is running for FIDE vice president.
Later, over coffee with a group of delegates and members of Jan Buettner's team (the third presidential candidate), someone recalls that FIDE moved its disputes to CAS, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, because Swiss civil courts got too expensive. Soon we are deep into jurisdiction, forum selection, and whether other board-game federations use CAS at all.
I ask if anyone knows the Olympiad standings. A delegate checks his phone.
"Uzbekistan leads. If there are no appeals."