Sam Watson embraces the mental climb of chess
“If you’re in the Olympic Village and you want to play chess send me a DM,” posted sport climbing athlete Sam Watson while competing at Paris 2024.
The American was surprised to be inundated with requests from fellow chess players around the world who found his online account.
“That was really fun,” the speed climber told Olympics.com after a competition in which he won bronze with a world record in his specialist format. “What’s hilarious is like, I would put something out like that previously, but during the Olympics, I got like a million and a half views.
“So many people that were not there [in Paris] were seeing that video, and people found my chess.com account, and I was getting a bunch of play requests and all this stuff, and I was like, man, this is cool.”
Hunkering down and engaging the mind is quite different to Watson’s day job, in which he is the current world record holder for the fastest scaling of a 15m high vertical wall, achieved in the small final in Paris in which he made the podium at his debut Olympic Games.
The teenager managed the feat, climbing a sheer wall equivalent to the height of a standard three-storey building, in a blistering 4.74 seconds.
Conversely, the more methodical game of chess aided in his sporting quest by engaging his mind away from the rapidity of his physical endeavours.
The Blitz Society Bar, a renowned establishment dedicated to chess in the heart of Paris, invited Watson to come and play some matches, offering another way to relax away from the intensity of the sport climbing competition.
“It was so fun,” Watson told us. “I got to meet a lot of really cool people, play some chess with people all around the world, like people travelling for the Olympics and various people.”
But there was one opponent who riled the competitive Watson.
“I’m very strongly against using my accomplishments to… if I feel bad about something to, you know, hype myself up, but the only a time I’ve ever done that in my life was I lost, I just got absolutely destroyed by this seven-year-old kid, and I had to whip out my medal so that I felt better about myself.
“I had to show him afterward. I was like, yeah, I’m here for the Games, or for the Jeux Olympiques, and I showed him my medal, and I was like, okay, I swear to God I’m not bad at everything I do. But he was incredible, probably one of the best chess players I’ve ever played, so…”
Such are the perils of the cerebral game that delights and frustrates so many, but there’s another tournament set to take place in France today, on World Chess Day, organised by one of the most competitive athletes of them all.