On Saturday, June 10, there is a world event in Panama. The Ukrainian Ruslan Ponomariov, former world champion, is in the country to participate in a simultaneous exhibition at the Altaplaza shopping center at 3 p.m.
The name Ponomariov is a hallmark in the universe of chess, like Maradona in soccer or Roberto “Mano de Piedra” Duran in boxing. He has incredible records: he was the youngest youth champion of all time and also the youngest world champion in the history of sport. His life, like that of other idols, also seems like one of those lives written to become a movie.
He was born 39 years ago in Gorlovka, a border town in Ukraine that the Russian army managed to destroy but that in 1983 was a storyteller. The son of an engineer and a teacher, he learned to play chess by reading the books in his home library when his parents were working. “I entertained myself on my own. Self-taught, I read my father’s ches books in front of a board,” the chess player told Diario Sur de España.
The leap came with an opportunity given to him by the educational system: as a state policy, they were looking for children interested in the game to train them. He had a coach and then, when Ponomariov was 10 years old, he moved with another family to another city to continue his training. In the midst of all that, Ukraine, his country, achieved independence.
In the interview with the Spanish media Diario Sur, Ponomariov reviewed the milestones of his life, the path traveled to reach the top of the sport in the world and also the tragic events. In 1991, when the country became independent from the Soviet Union, it was a watershed: “My parents, like many others, had to look for their lives. I remember that there was a time when it was not so easy to get food, sometimes we didn’t have water and we had power cuts,” he told journalist Manuel Alzuaga Herrera. The boy never had a bicycle, but the books and the game were his refuge and his passion. And it paid off.
In 1995 he was U-12 world champion in Kiev. In 1996 he won the U-18 European Championship, an insolence for a 12-year-old. Ponomariov followed: youth world champion at the age of 14, the title of Grand Master in 1998, again as the youngest player to have achieved it, and FIDE K.O. world champion in 2002 at the age of 18 – again: the youngest to achieve it. And the list goes on.
That world genius will play a game in Panama with 25 young people from different provinces of the country. Perhaps for some of them the Ukrainian represents what someone else was for him: the inspiration that, in an adverse context, begins to move the chips of a movie destination.