Drug Testing issue on the Eve of the Olympiad

The 35th Chess Olympiad has started in Bled with the focus immediately being put on FIDE's insistence that players allow themselves to be tested for drugs. Many of the proscribed substances actually lower performance in Mindsports and the whole ridiculous idea is a stupid and misguided attempt to get chess accepted at the Olympic Games, a notion recently discounted by the Olympic Executive Committee. There is even the threat of a $100,000 fine, which is actually quite laughable since I can state with a reasonable degree of certainty that the number of players competing at Bled who have that kind of money in the bank can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The rules even appear to apply to non-playing trainers and captains. Grandmaster Alexander Baburin of Ireland and England's Jon Speelman have written an open letter to Fide pointing out that the Fide regulations are based on an IOC document of 1999 and that a new document from WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency), which is at the draft stage, sets out a graduated response to a positive test and does not mention financial penalties. The United States Chess Federation has already passed a motion refusing to implement any penalties applied by Fide. The letter, which has already attracted the signature of more than 100 titled players including Nigel Short, John Speelman, John Nunn, John Emms, Jonathan Levitt, Richard Palliser, Craig Pritchett and Jonathan Rowson, requests Fide: " to suspend drug testing until FIDE has signed up to the new WADA document and at the very least to undertake that in the interim, in the unfortunate event of a positive test, these potentially ruinous fines will not be levied. And to submit for the approval of the FIDE General Assembly in Bled a new document consonant with the more reasonable WADA draft code. Then in what is clearly a bout of wishful thinking they write: " We also hope that in the future FIDE will undertake more consultation on this and other important matters with professional chess players, for the benefit of chess in general."