Foreman, Watson, Anand

The last time a former champion clambered back to challenge for the title again was in 1990.

The Candidates chess tournament will always suffer in people’s estimation for not being the World Championship. The winner of the event that nominates the challenger to the reigning champion may have beaten the best of the rest, but will know that the bigger test lies ahead. It is the challenger’s performance in the title bout that will eventually confer more or less meaning and prestige to his win in the Candidates event.

That said, Viswanathan Anand’s win in Khanty-Mansyisk is rather remarkable, not just in the context of his own career, but also a rare occurrence in chess, may be even in the wider context of sport itself.

Anand said that he had “no idea what to expect” when he arrived in Russia. He is 44 and perhaps felt every day of it ahead of the Candidates tournament. His title defense against Magnus Carlsen late last year was far from robust; a break after that did not really improve the four-time world champion’s form, as he slumped to losses against Levon Aronian and Hikaru Nakamura in Zurich. His performance over the last four years — a period Anand admitted he did not really want to think about — has been in keeping with that of a player in decline (terminal decline, if you ask some).

To turn his form around so comprehensively — to beat a strong field (the average Elo rating at Khanty-Mansyisk was 2770, the same as Anand’s rating at the start of the tournament) while remaining unbeaten over 14 rounds — is in itself special. Doing it at his age and after being completely written off is even more so.

The last time a former champion clambered back to challenge for the title again was in 1990, the year of the last great Kasparov-Karpov battle. Not considering automatic re-matches, only Mikhail Botvinnik and Karpov have ever come back after being deposed to challenge for the title again, since the FIDE world championship was established in 1948.

Even if one widens the catchment area to include all sports, finding an instance where a former champion defied the field and his age to muster one more challenge is a difficult task. George Foreman coming out of retirement to become the oldest Heavyweight Champion in history at 45 (17 years after retirement and 20 years after The Rumble in the Jungle) comes to mind. (Edit: My colleague Daksh Panwar suggests a more apt, if portentous, example: Golfer Tom Watson, who 26 years after his last Major, missed an 8-foot putt on the 72nd hole that would have given him the 2009 US Open. He was 59 then)

Then again, the instant recall may be because Foreman, who by then had drifted so far from the boxing pale that he was an ordained minister, won the title bout in 1994 against Michael Moorer. Had he lost, there is a possibility that Foreman would have been remembered instead as just another over-the-hill lugger, a born-again nutter, who did not know when his time was up.

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Raakesh is a principle correspondent based in New Delhi. Raakesh.natraj@expressindia.com