Boris Spassky, world chess champion in 1969, died aged 88, the Russian Chess Federation announced on Thursday. Particularly gifted and precocious, Spassky, born in 1937 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), became the 10th World Chess Champion in 1969. But he held the title for only three years.
In 1972, he played the match that was to mark his life, in Iceland, against the American prodigy Bobby Fischer, a game with the overtones of an East-West geopolitical confrontation, remembered as the “match of the century”. Defeated, Boris Spassky fell from grace. He moved to France in 1976 after marrying a French woman of Russian origin. He obtained French nationality two years later.
Unofficial revenge against Fischer also lost
He didn’t return to the public eye until many years later, in 1992 in Yugoslavia, in an unofficial rematch against Bobby Fischer, which he also lost. After suffering two strokes in 2006 and 2010, he disappeared two years later from his French home and ended up in Moscow, where he appeared old and weakened on Russian television, with white hair and drawn features.
On X, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) paid tribute to “one of the most talented players of his generation”. and “prodigy of his discipline. Anatoli Karpov, famous for his duel with Garry Kasparov, also paid tribute to Spassky on Thursday. “He was always one of my main idols. There was (the Cuban player) Capablanca in first place and Spassky in second “said Karpov, quoted by the TASS agency.
