Fridrik Olafsson

◈A boy at his father's board

Friðrik Ólafsson was born in Reykjavík on 26 January 1935 and learned the moves from his father at the age of eight, in the middle of a world war, on an island that had almost no chess culture to give him. He entered his first tournament at eleven and shared sixth place with 4½/8 in the second division of the Icelandic Championship; at twelve he won the second division of the Reykjavík Championship. There were no grandmasters to train him, no schools of the Soviet kind, no library of theory. What Iceland had was long winters and a boy who did not stop.

In 1952, aged seventeen, he won the Icelandic Championship for the first time, beating Lárus Johnsen in a playoff — the first of six national titles, which came in 1952, 1953, 1957, 1961, 1962 and 1969. That same year he played his first Chess Olympiad, in Helsinki. In 1953, at eighteen, he took the Nordic Championship at Esbjerg in Denmark on the back of a six-game winning streak, and won bronze at the World Junior Championship. The rest of Europe began to ask who he was.

◈Hastings, and a night in the cells

At the 1954 Amsterdam Olympiad Iceland forced its way into the A Final among the top twelve nations of the world, and Ólafsson held the draw against Max Euwe, Wolfgang Unzicker, Luděk Pachman, Gideon Ståhlberg and David Bronstein — five of the strongest players alive. He was nineteen.

The breakthrough came at Christmas 1955. He travelled to the Hastings Congress in England without a hotel reservation and spent his first night there in a police cell. Then he went out and shared first prize with Viktor Korchnoi on 7½/9. The International Master title followed in 1956. That same year he lost a match on home soil to Bent Larsen by 3½–4½, opening a rivalry with the great Dane that would run for the next half-century and give this archive many of its best games.

◈Portorož, and a nation's first crown

In August 1958 he went to the Interzonal at Portorož and finished equal fifth, qualifying for the Candidates and taking the grandmaster title automatically with it — the first grandmaster Iceland ever had. Along the way he beat a fifteen-year-old Bobby Fischer, then playing his first Interzonal. Harry Golombek wrote in the British Chess Magazine that “everybody, players and spectators alike, was pleased to see Icelandic grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson qualify for the Candidates.” Chessmetrics, reconstructing the ratings of that era, puts his strength that October at 2692 — thirteenth in the world.

The 1959 Candidates Tournament ran twenty-eight rounds across Bled, Zagreb and Belgrade against Tal, Keres, Petrosian, Smyslov, Gligorić, Benkő and Fischer, and it was brutal: Ólafsson finished seventh of eight with 10/28. But the individual results were extraordinary. He beat Fischer. He beat Keres. And he beat Tigran Petrosian twice. For one of those games a giant demonstration board was erected and a crowd of five thousand assembled to watch; when he won, they carried him off on their shoulders.

He kept winning. Beverwijk 1959 was his outright. He took the zonal tournaments at Berg en Dal in 1960 and Mariánské Lázně in 1961, going twenty-four games without a defeat. At the Varna Olympiad of 1962 he won the individual gold medal on board one — the top board of the world, taken by a man from a country of a couple of hundred thousand people. In 1963 he shared third at the first Piatigorsky Cup in Los Angeles with 7½/14, behind only Keres and Petrosian.

◈The lawyer, and the summer of 1972

He had made a decision about chess before chess could make one about him. “It's a very strange thing that already from a young age, when I was starting to play chess and I realized that I might make a very good chess player, I also thought at the same time that I should not become too dependent on this,” he said. “I decided that I would never let chess take over my life.” He took his law degree in 1968 and spent the next six years as an officer in Iceland's Department of Justice and Church, playing far less than his talent deserved.

Then, in the summer of 1972, the world came to Reykjavík. Fischer against Spassky, on his island, in his city — and Ólafsson, who had known Fischer since Portorož, was inside the drama rather than watching it. “I was in his suite with Lombardy,” he remembered, “and we both tried to persuade him to come and play the second game. But in the end, he said, ‘Okay, but then you have to turn back the clock.’” Of the young Fischer he kept a gentler memory: “He said he would be World Champion in two years, and I said, ‘Bobby, please, I think you're a bit in a hurry.’”

The match reawakened him. In 1974, at thirty-nine, he became a chess professional for the first time in his life and tied for second at Las Palmas. In 1975 he shared second at Tallinn with Boris Spassky, behind Keres. And 1976 was his finest year as a mature player: shared first at Wijk aan Zee with Ljubomir Ljubojević, ahead of Mikhail Tal, and shared first at Reykjavík with Jan Timman.

◈The president and the hostage son

At the FIDE Congress in Buenos Aires in 1978 he was elected the fourth President of the international federation, succeeding Max Euwe and beating Svetozar Gligorić and Narciso Rabell Méndez in a close race. He was forty-three. He wanted commercial sponsorship for the game and better relations across the Iron Curtain, and he inherited a world championship cycle that had already become a proxy battlefield.

He could still play, too. On 1 November 1980 in Buenos Aires he sat down against the reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov and won — the only time a sitting FIDE President has beaten a reigning world champion in a tournament game. It also enrolled him in the “Mikhail Chigorin Club”, that small company of players who defeated a sitting world champion without ever holding the title themselves.

The presidency broke on the Korchnoi affair. Viktor Korchnoi had defected from the Soviet Union in 1976, and the Soviets were holding his son Igor. Before Korchnoi's 1981 title match against Karpov, Ólafsson delayed the planned 19 September start date in a bid to get the Soviets to release the boy. He had used the highest office in chess to try to reunite a family, and Moscow did not forgive it. According to Yuri Averbakh's Centre-Stage and Behind the Scenes, his handling of that match cost him Soviet support; they threw their weight behind the FIDE vice-president, Florencio Campomanes, who took the presidency from him in 1982. Øystein Brekke wrote that FIDE “lost its innocence” in that election, because “many of the winner's votes were probably bought and paid for.”