Coronavirus Candidates

With every major sports event getting cancelled or postponed this month -- no thanks to the coronavirus Covid-19 -- you might think the Candidates tournament would have attracted considerable attention from mainstream sports broadcasting ... and you would be wrong. ESPN was the major exception.

espn.com/chess

Let's have those four stories in chronological order.

• 2020-03-14: The Candidates: Eight-member chess tournament to provide rare glimpse of major sport • 'In a world now largely reduced to a sum of deserted airports, empty supermarket aisles, ghost cities and panic on an overdrive, one of the few major sporting events that remains obstinately on schedule involves eight chess players and a bloodied slice of the Romanov dynasty. The Candidates, a marathon 14-round 5,000,000 euros prize fund tournament that will have eight of the world's top Grandmasters locked in combat in Russia's fourth-largest city Yekaterinburg, is scheduled to start on March 15 and run till April 4.'
  
  
• 2020-03-21: Elbow bumps and sanitizers - scenes from the Candidates chess tournament in Russia
  
  
• 2020-03-23: 'I don't want to be here' - Russian GM Grischuk asks for Candidates to be called off
  
  
• 2020-03-26: 'We can't lock players in Russia' - FIDE stops Candidates tournament

Going back even further in time, most -- if not all -- of the older ESPN chess stories had something to do with India. Take this next one, for example.

• 2020-01-09: Q&A with Viswanathan Anand - Emotional tempest, chess politics and McEnroe • 'Viswanathan Anand has recently released his autobiography 'Mind Master' in collaboration with ESPN's Susan Ninan.'

The same Susan Ninan was the writer of the four stories on the Candidates. Thanks India; thanks Vishy; and thanks Susan Ninan! Have I overlooked the autobiography?