Chess, boxing create ‘essence of excellence’

Paris: Dripping with sweat, gasping for breath and desperately trying to refocus after fending off hooks and throwing uppercuts, Nikopol warily moves his bishop across the chessboard...

Once the literary creation of French artist Enki Bilal’s illustrated books, chessboxing is now a reality, a mix of chess and boxing played out in flesh and, occasionally, blood across the world.

It combines the physical and the intellectual — and is growing in popularity.

The sport, which makes its first fightnight appearance in the ring in France in November, has grown out of Nikopol’s adventures in Bilal’s 1992 book “Cold Equator”, the final chapter in an epic trilogy in which the hero triumphs in a combat combining the strength of boxing and the intelligence of chess.

“At one point, I wanted my characters to confront each other in a spectacular way, in a gladiatorial way, just as sport does,” Bilal said.

“I wanted to find a sport that would epitomise the very essence of excellence in a human being, namely his supreme intelligence and his strength.”

“What hit me straight away was chess. And boxing is important because it has a nobility. Behind the violence there is a whole philosophy of movement, of space. I immediately imagined them in a ring.”

Ten years after Nikopol climbed through the ropes, Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh took the sport off the page and stuck it into a real ring.

In 2003, he organised the first fight — of which he was one of the two protagonists — and created the World Chess Boxing Organisation (WCBO) before promoting bouts around the world via the Intellectual Fight Club (IFC).

Today, there are 10 national federations and around 3,500 combatants, mainly in Germany, Britain and India and almost entirely men.

“It’s the most complete sport,” says Thomas Cazeneuve, a recruitment consultant who became France’s first world champion in 2017.