Perhaps that needs elaboration. Of the 36 individual medals, 6 were won by India, then 4 each by China, Poland and Russia. I will guess that the “most successful delegation” factored in some sort of team performance with regard to the top 3 scores from a country in each section. Yes? It’s a way of getting each country to send a large delegation (at least 36 players); national pride might get trumped by politics, but not commerce!

“I must say that this kind of boycott (if such occurred) strikes as a another example of how politics interferes with chess.”(Aviv Bushinsky)

“What reason had been cancelled the anthems issue of the all winners this year, if not a political one? It seems as Israeli anthem is not acceptable these days in Turkey.” (GM Boris Alterman)

Of course, it is not entirely impossible that it was indeed for political reasons that the anthems were not played. After all, a clear case of politics interfering with sports occurred earlier this year in tennis when Israeli player Shahar Peer was denied the right to play in Dubai. But Shahar Peer was then the only player being denied the right to play, and the organizers had motivated their decision on the recent political tension between Israel and the Arab countries. Here however, as has already been pointed out, it was a whole group that was denied to hear their anthem, and there is no reason whatsoever to single out Israel as the political target behind that group.

Oh, and perhaps those who used this site to post their anti Israel opinions might benefit from a game of chess with an Israeli child – it might purge then of their need to politicise everything……To paraphrase Freud; sometimes a chess game is just a chess game.

Even in the chess world we must speak out when such as injustice is perpetrated. I would like to see Turkey banned from organizing international chess events in the future.

Putting our heads in the sand when it comes to Isreal,as Arne suggests is not the answer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP0jaenKrJ0

and to other national anthems
and then lets talk about chess again and forget about the rest for a while.

Is it known if there are complaints from other countries? It would be handier to make a complaint together of those countries that didn’t like that their anthem wasn’t played.

But maybe it is better for the kids also not to play the anthems, it takes ages for them to wait. I guess almost none of the kids minded that their anthem wasn’t played. All they wanted was their nice medal as fast as possible i think. (I would at that age)

@Arne you are right about discussions about Israel. It is to controversial and lots of politics are getting involved, while this site should mainly focus at chess.

I just wanted to point at the plain fact, that the complaint was mostly about disrespect towards the delegations suspecting some political reasons behind (and precisely this is the reason why I think with the complaint they went too far). Nonetheless whenever an Israeli team is involved in such controversies this politival background is sadly true. F. i. a huge load of comments here were about West Bank and Palestine etc. and not about organizing issues. (I think at a WCh playing the anthems is not an extra service- it is just normal).