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Press release
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For those of you who missed our previous articles on the subject, here's a geographical rundown of the place that is bidding for the 2014 Olympiad. Those who didn't should skip the first section of this article and go to part two, which brings you new pictures and stories.
The Arctic Circle is one of the major circles of latitude, running 66.56° north of the Equator. It marks the southern extremity of the "polar day", which is when the sun is visible for 24 hours (usually referred to as the "midnight sun") at least once per year, and polar night, when the sun does not appear above the horizon for 24 hours. The midnight sun can be seen in summer for many days, weeks or months, depending on how far north of the arctic circle a place is located.
The Arctic Circle [Graphic by Swinburne University]
The places where people can see the midnight sun are Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and some extremities of Russia. At Finland's northernmost point, the sun does not set for 73 days during summer.
The city of Tromsø lies in the northern-most region of Norway, 69° 40' 33"
N, 18° 55' 10" E,
almost 400 km inside the Arctic Circle
The island city of Tromsø as seen in Google Earth
In Tromsø there are remains of settlement that go back to the end of the ice age. The first church was built in 1252, and in the 19th century it became a major centre for Arctic hunting. During World War II it served briefly as the seat of Norwegian government, and the German battleship Tirpitz was sunk off the Tromsø Island in 1944. Today there are over 100 nationalities in the town's population.
A note on the name: in Europe it is known as "Tromsö", but the Norwegians pronounce it "Troom-sa", the first vowel as in "rook" and the second consisting of a special Norwegian schwa which is not easy to transcribe, describe or even vocalise. But these Nordic people are generous and will accept various pronunciations.
We start our story with a trip to the "ranch" of our host and the organiser of the Arctic Chess Challenge, Jan Sigmund Berglund. All the players of the tournament are invited, and almost all actually accept. In our bus you may spot a rating very close to 2800 – and three members of the Carlsen clan.
Jan Sigmund was one of the best junior players in Northern Norway (with a peak
Elo of over 2200) and won the Championship twice. He has a popular
chess column in the newspaper "Nordlys". He is one of the driving
forces behind the Tromsø bid to stage the 2014 Chess Olympiad.
The Berglund ranch is a seaside property. It is called a ranch because
it has horses and goats.
The Berglund children are assisted by their friends to tend the animals
and herd them into the pens.
This is sea front, with a view of one of Norway's famous fjords
Boys will be boys, and no sooner have the chess players emerged from the
bus...
...than a football is deployed and serious play begins.
Soccer, like chess, is a violent game. Here two players quite literally
fight for the ball
Magnus Carlsen, hundreds of Elo points stronger than any of the others, who are all budding chessplayers themselves, gets the respect due to the super-star of Norwegian sports. He is approached with diffident politenesss and always treated with a great deal of reverence...
All lies: his best friends love to rag him, and it turns out that he is
imminently raggable!
Unfortunately clever-clogs is also an excellent football player – if the chess thing doesn't work out he will always have professional soccer as a fallback. Note that in Norway the girls join in the sporting activities. In many other countries they don't – at least not with impunity.
For those chess players who haven't exhausted their energy on the soccer field there is a trampoline to get rid of the last milligrams of excess adrenaline. Watching all of this, it occurred to us that chess is quite an unnatural passtime. Adrenaline (or epinephrine) is a "fight or flight" hormone and is released from the adrenal glands when danger threatens or in an emergency. "Danger" can come in the form of a predator, growling suddenly from the undergrowth, or when your chess opponent plays 12...exf5 out of the blue – or launches a kingside attack, or you launch a kingside attack, or a myriad other common chessboard situations. The natural reaction of the adrenaline-filled body is to dive for cover, grab a spear to confront the enemy, run for dear life. It is not to furrow your brow, wipe away sweat, scratch your head, or raise your eyes to glance at your opponent. We wonder what the body does with all that adrenaline if no vigorous activity follows its release. One solution to this clearly unhealty situation is to give players a field and a football after the games. Another is a trampoline. Chess boxing? But that is subject we will come back to in another report...
This is Anders Hagen, rated around 2100, dealing with a flood of adrenaline
in the Arctic
Challenge playing hall in Tromsø. Anders is one of Magnus' best friends
and the lad who is respectfully pulling the hood of his sweatshirt over his
head in a picture above.
Jan Sigmund has provided delicious fresh salad, a choice of red
or white wine...
... and is barbecuing meat and fish in aluminium foil, plenty of it for
everybody
Beer and soda drinks are cooled by putting them in a brook that flows through the property. We acutally got former FIDE Vice President and legal expert Morten Sand, who like many Norwegian males is almost two meters tall, to climb down the embankment and get us some beer.
Enjoying an evening meal – the initiated will count five Carlsens
in this picture
Before we left we asked Jan Sigmund Berglund whether he could, in case Tromsø gets the 2014 Olympiad bid, actually host 2000 players on his ranch. His answer: not all at once...
The next day: Tromsø museum, which contains a lot of interesting geological exhibits, and a breath-taking slide show of the northern lights (aurora borealis), which they unfortunately switch off in the summer. In compensation they keep the sun up all night, so somehow it all evens out.
The geological subduction zone, where oceanic and continental crusts collide. Samples of the different rocks are also nicely put on display on the University campus near the Botanical Garden.
This is how the inhabitants of the Troms region lived many centuries ago
The above chart shows the average temperature in the region over the last 10,000 years, i.e. since the stone age. Note that what we are currently deeply worried about is the last bit of the curve on the right.
The next day we decide to work off the sumptuous feast with some modest mountain climbing. The bridge leads from the island city of Tromsø to the mainland and one of the two popular peaks (the one without the gondola lift)
Scaling the peak begins very gradually, but it is further than you think...
...and steeper, and warmer, in spite of the lofty altitude
Beautiful lakes and pools of the clearest water you've ever seen...
...and patches of – snow! Your intrepid reporter thankfully cools off
from the arduous climb
Doesn't this remind you of Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer
above the Mists"
The flora on the mountain slopes is short-stemmed and beautiful
Near the top a couple of fellow climbers – the indigenous Nordic raindeer
A final view from the top – with a ferry crossing the fjord in idyllic
splendor
A final picture: this is Jan Sigmund Berglund's ranch in winter
You think this is all? Not by a long shot. Stand by for part two, where we go fishing in the Norwegian Fjords and whale-watching over the continental shelf. And then tell us with a straight face: this is not the right place for a Chess Olympiad.
