Athletistic / Others. Our portal continues to inform you about the most interesting and important sporting events in history. Today is the turn of the Russian national hockey team, a new football legend and chess kings – Mikhail Tal and Garry Kasparov. Details – further.

Black and white battles of people and machines

If you thought I was going to tell the plot of a little-known action movie, then you’re wrong. It’s all about chess. And the month of May turned out to be quite eventful in this sport as a whole.

On May 7, 1960, the chess world recognized a new champion. It was about Mikhail Tal, who beat another Soviet grandmaster, Mikhail Botvinnik, who at the time was the strongest chess player on the planet. The meeting was held in Moscow and, according to the regulations, it was to consist of 24 parties. The champion needed 12 points to defend his title. But the challenger turned out to be much stronger than Botvinnik thought.

As a result, the game had to be stopped after the 21st game. And all thanks to Tal’s brilliant and attacking style, who was not afraid to take risks, which put the opponent in a difficult position throughout the game. The decisive part of the duel ended in a draw, and the total score was 12.5 by 8.5 points in favor of the challenger, who, by the way, lost only 2 games in the battle for the world chess crown. Thus, Mikhail Tal won the title of strongest grandmaster for the first time in his career.

It is noteworthy that almost a year later the opponents met again, and here already Botvinnik took a rather convincing revenge, ending the fight earlier than expected with the score 13:8.

Another rather unusual revenge took place on May 11, 1997. The younger generation of our readers may not have heard of it, but older chess fans will easily name this unique phenomenon at that time. Yes, it was a battle between the world’s best grandmaster Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. And, as you understand, not the first. The first stayed with the Russian and died a year earlier, in 1996 in Philadelphia. This time, New York became the location of an epic battle in the spirit of The Matrix (although not yet filmed at the time) and The Terminator, where a game room was set up on the 35th floor of the skyscraper. , and viewers could watch the retransmission of the match in the room on the ground floor.

The match went to varying degrees of success, but in the end, Deep Blue proved stronger. Kasparov did not deny his mistake in the decisive game, but he also had many claims against IBM. In particular, the grandmaster complained that some of the moves were the result of using a questionable algorithm: supposedly, a machine can’t think of such a thing on its own. Additionally, Kasparov accused IBM of dishonest play, creating unhealthy tension around the match, and offered to arrange a third duel with the fulfillment of certain demands put forward by the chess player. But his fans never saw him, and Deep Blue didn’t play full matches after that. So the world couldn’t decide who is stronger: man or machine?

Russian Hockey May

The week of May from 8 to 13 in different years has become a landmark for national ice hockey. In 2011, Russia, on a non-alternative basis, received the right to host the third world championship for itself only in the 21st century. Earlier, we recall, the best teams on the planet came to St. Petersburg in 2000, and in Moscow Mundial hockey was held seven years later. So, on May 13, exactly 11 years ago, the Congress of the International Ice Hockey Federation approved our country as the venue for the 2016 World Championship.

Initially, the world hockey forum was to be organized by Latvia, Ukraine and Denmark, but the Balts, having seen the list of candidates, immediately decided to withdraw the application and try their luck in the dispute already for 2017. Ukraine and Denmark withdrew their candidacy a few days before the congress itself. Thus, the Russian delegation learned that it was on their shoulders that the burden of organizing the 80th World Championship would fall. He passed, if you remember, in both capitals of Russia at once, and the host team of the tournament, falling under the “curse of native ice”, was able to get only bronze medals , beating Team USA in the consolation final with a score of 7:2.

But the main joy associated with the last spring month came to us even earlier, in 2009. Then, on May 10, the Russian team led by Vyacheslav Bykov achieved the first “golden double” in modern history – two seasons consecutive championships. The Canadian team, which faced our guys in the final, opened the scoring in the first period after Jason Spezza sent the puck from the “nickle” into the open net, left by Ilya Bryzgalov, who had gone out of bounds. True, later the goalkeeper of the Russian team did not make any mistakes, making a total of 37 saves per game. Victory was secured by the effective actions of Oleg Saprykin, who corrected the trajectory of Vitaly Atyushov’s shot, as well as Alexander Radulov, who converted a 2-for-1 in the second period after the Canadians committed an error on our blue line.

Earlier, in 2008, the year of the 100th anniversary of hockey, our guys also defeated the founders of hockey, but already in overtime, thanks to the puck of team captain Ilya Kovalchuk, who literally “kept silent throughout the tournament. In 2012 and 2014, “Red Machine” added 2 more tracks to the piggy bank, but this, as they say, is “a completely different story.”

Anyway, happy birthday

The special military operation that began at the end of February and which subsequently deprived Russian sport of almost any representation on the world stage, of course, has become a very unpleasant moment in relations between Russia and Ukraine. But I think my colleagues will support my position that sport should simply be out of politics. Moreover, part of modern Ukrainian sport is also part of the common history of a great country called the Soviet Union, and on this day we simply cannot ignore such an event as the anniversary of the appearance of Dynamo Kyiv club.

Official documents indicate that 95 years ago, on May 13, the Charter of the Kyiv Proletarian Sports Society was officially registered, the logo of which later became the famous rhombus with a monogram in the form of a capital letter “D “. But it was Dynamo who played their first match only a year later. The fact is that the base of the team was supposed to be employees of the Department of State Political Administration of the Ukrainian SSR. But most of them at that time had already been declared for the “Soviet Commercial Employees” team, which was one of the leaders in the championship in kyiv. So they decide not to reorganize at the height of the season, postponing the creation of the blue and white team to 1928. But even then, the Dynamo football team did not make it into the kyiv championship in due to bureaucratic inconsistencies, but only played a few friendlies. However, in 1936, when the USSR Championship was created, it was the capital’s football players who were declared to participate in it as the strongest team in Ukraine.

Serious victories did not come to Dynamo Kyiv immediately, but they will forever go down in history as the first non-Moscow team, which managed to win the gold medal in the USSR championship. And this success was only the beginning of a whole series of victories, won, in many respects, thanks to the coaching talent of Valery Valeryevich Lobanovsky. Under him, the stars of Oleg Blokhin and Igor Belanov lit up at Dynamo, which in 1975 and 1986, respectively, were recognized as the best players in the Old World – that is, exactly in when the club won the Cup Winners’ Cup.

Don’t forget that in 1975 Dynamo also beat Bayern Munich in a two-legged encounter for the European Super Cup (1:0 away, 2:0 at home) and in the presence of 102,000 spectators came to their home “Dynamo” – the Olympic Stadium in Kyiv – were the first Soviet teams to hoist the coveted trophy above their heads.

At the time of the collapse of the USSR and, as a result, the abolition of the Allied championship, the team of Valery Lobanovsky, who was the head coach from 1974 to 1991, managed to become the most successful in the Soviet Union, having won a total of 13 national championship titles. And this is our common history, however difficult the current political situation may seem. Therefore, happy birthday, “Dynamo” from kyiv!

Alexander Petriakov, SPORT.RU