Only a month left till the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2024, but FIDE and the Local Organizing Committee face serious troubles with players’ visa issues. Candidates from various countries submitted their visa applications few months ago, but still haven’t received any updates on their status. FIDE urged through Twitter, sending an urgent visa appeal to the Canadian Government, but what will happen if visas don’t come on time?
FIDE CEO Emil Sutovsky answered some questions on the case through his official Twitter account. Referring to claims that some of the players who don’t get visas could be replaced, Sutovsky strongly denies: “FIDE won’t replace players for visa issues or postpone the event. We have a strong team and enough resources to ensure staging it elsewhere at the same dates:”, adding that FIDE’s focus is to organize the event in Canada.
Sutovsky confirmed that players from four countries have issues with visas. The suspected countries are Russia, India, Azerbaijan and China, which could mean that as many as 11 players are affected (Ian Nepomniachtchi, Praggnanandhaa R, Vidit Santosh Gujrathi, Gukesh D, Nijat Abasov in the Open section, and Lei Tingjie, Aleksandra Goryachkina, Kateryna Lagno, Vaishali R, Tan Zhongyi and Humpy Koneru in the Women’s section)!
If the Canadian Government doesn’t approve players’ request to travel to Canada, FIDE has a plan B, claims Sutovsky. A possible plan B is to move the event to another location (probably Spain), which would be an extremely hard task with only 30 days left before the start of the tournament.
The tournament is an eight-player, double round-robin tournament, with 14 rounds where each player is facing the others twice: once with the black pieces and once with the white pieces.
