The life of the Nordic player has clear parallels with that of the character Beth Harmon in the Netflix series. Cramling, still active, can remember all the quick games he plays
When Pia arrived in Argentina, the situation in the country was very complicated. General Videla’s military junta continued to subject the people to a veritable regime of terror. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo association called for justice for their missing children. Swedish footballer Ralf Edstrom was briefly kidnapped by hooded men during the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, months before the Chess Olympiad. The land lived in a permanent state of grief, but young Pia did not know what was happening beyond the board. “When I play chess, I’m in a bubble,” Cramling admits. “I have no idea what’s going on around me.”
The Swedish chess team listened to music in the concentration hotel. Seventies pop from ‘Nationalteatern’, a very successful national group. Pia heard and hummed those songs. Songs like ‘Poppens Mussollinis’, with lyrics that would have been censored had they not been sung in Swedish: «The Mussolinis of pop are back on stage with dancing dreams of freedom». Cramling lost the first game of the Olympiad against Poland’s Anna Jurczynska, but then scored 11 of 14 points, earning her the individual silver medal on her plate. Sweden finished ninth. Pia still remembers that date as a key moment in her career: “I realized they weren’t that strong.”
Pia’s maternal grandparents were originally from Finland. During World War II, Pia’s mother, Anna-Liisa, fled from Finland to Sweden by boat with a friend, seeking peace and refuge. She was a seamstress. On a rainy day he met Inge, a pretty office worker, in Tivoli in Gröna Lund in Stockholm. They felt attraction in an amusement park. They had two children: Dan and Pia. The father taught his eldest son the rules of chess in his spare time. The mother, on the other hand, could sit in front of the dashboard for a while, but it really wasn’t her passion, she just wanted to be at home in peace, enjoying her little ones.
Inge was also a football coach. The girl who played goalkeeper left the team, and Pia’s father encouraged his daughter to try under the goal. As Cramling tells me this story, Spain scores a goal against Japan during the World Cup in Qatar. Morata. We watch the replay on TV. “In your day you would have held back, wouldn’t you?” I say awkwardly. “Don’t believe it. I played games, but I was pretty lazy.” Pia started playing chess at the age of 10. She always followed in her brother’s footsteps. He and Dan played table tennis and they fished together. When her brother started to visit the SK Passanten chess club, Pia also visited it. Soon, at the age of 13, he won the school championship. Then he thought, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.”
“In my early years of chess, I was very shy. I knew that if I kept winning games, everyone would start talking about me, the girl who beats the boys. And I just wanted them to see me as just another man,” Cramling confesses. «My goal was the same as my brother Dan’s: to become the absolute grandmaster. I wasn’t interested in female grandmaster, an easier title to get. That’s why I almost always played against men. That’s why Pia had short hair. And he signed his forms as «P. Creep’, to hide her feminine side under the tree-lined shadow of the capital ‘P’.
The next Olympic Games, after the one in Buenos Aires, were held in Valletta in 1980. Pia decided not to participate in order not to lose two weeks of school. In 1982, in the Swiss city of Lucerne, Pia again represented Sweden, already as the country’s first board, a position she has defended for 40 years. In Lucerne one of those sporting vicissitudes occurred that only appears on the board. The final round came and Pia needed half a point more to take the gold medal. Opposite the Canadian Nava Sterenberg. “She thought about offering me a tie because she knew I would secure the medal,” says Pia. “In addition, Sterenberg soon had a flight back to Canada, so we both wanted to be ready quickly. But the game got so interesting that Nava lost the flight and beat me. Cramling again had to settle for the silver medal.
Pia Cramling has won Olympic gold three times (1984,1988, 2022). His winning streak at the Olympic Games is an unprecedented record: he has collected 47 games without losing! Pia’s last defeat took place in Calviá (2004) against the Georgian Maia Chiburdanidze. In Europe, Cramling was crowned champion twice (2003, 2010) and reached the semi-finals of the women’s world championship just as often. She was the fifth player in history to earn the title of grandmaster and has, at various times, placed herself as the best player in the world in the FIDE rankings. Cramling has played against almost all the best chess players of the 20th century and can boast of beating Bronstein, Taimanov, the world champion Smyslov or the legend Viktor Korchnoi.
The first time Cramling played Korchnoi was in England at the sixth edition of the Lloyds Bank Masters Open in 1982. At that time, Korchnoi was the second strongest player in the world. For Pia a dream came true: playing against her idol. Pia suggested a Spanish opening, a variant of the middle move. On move number five, Korchnói (black) thought for more than an hour. “He wanted to avoid any continuation that would lead to equality,” she explains. On move number 39, Cramling caught a knight and missed a mate net. “It was easy to beat him, but I didn’t see it. I was constantly checked by him and we drew the tables”, recalls the Swedish player. The spectators had already formed a large circle around the board. Korchnoi spoke with Pia for a long time in the traditional “post mortem” analysis. There’s a photo that shows this moment: him, in a jacket and tie, with a half-smile, perhaps breathing a sigh of relief after being close to the abyss; she, with her gaze fixed on Korchnoi, satisfied, glad that she fought.
Some time later, Cramling managed to defeat Korchnoi. The Swiss nationalized Soviet did not take the defeat very seriously: “In your team, Susan Polgar is the only one who knows anything about chess,” he sneered. Pia dropped the myth for a few years, until life reconnected them and they forged a tender friendship. “When we met at the Gibraltar Open, my daughter Anna knocked Korchnoi on the head, and he would happily leave her behind,” Pia recalled. “He was a lovely man.”
Pia met chess player Juan Manuel Bellón at the 1984 Zurich tournament when he offered to be her coach. Although, to be more precise, the story goes back to 1977. Pia was then 13 years old and played outside Sweden for the first time. “I saw a Spaniard drawing on his form. I didn’t talk to him, but the way he painted on paper, like an artist, caught my attention. Years later, what happened in Zurich. As a professional (and sentimental) couple, they went together to the Women’s Interzonal Tournament in Havana. Until Pia decided in 1986 to leave the board for a year to devote herself to her studies. “Juan couldn’t believe it,” says Pia. Cramling worked for three months at Kockums, a company that built submarines. “It was terrible, a very sad period. Because I wanted to give myself over to chess, but I didn’t dare. In Sweden it was not well regarded for anyone to play chess professionally. It wasn’t considered a job,” he recalls.
Fortunately, he followed his heart and returned to the boards. And under the shelter of Juan, with whom she lived in Malmö, to be closer to the road to Spain, as she herself admits. “Without the help of my parents and my partner Juan, I could never have lived as a chess player for all these years,” Pia admits. For much of these years, more than twenty, Pia lived in Fuengirola, where her daughter Anna was born in 2002, whom she breastfed between rounds of the occasional tournament.
Having competed at the highest level for nearly fifty years, Cramling is an authoritative voice on chess and the gender gap. “Is elite chess a macho sport?” I ask him. “It has been, as it happens in every other area of life. When she was little she would sometimes hit a boy and her friends would make fun of her for losing to a girl. It’s a scene I’ve experienced in different ways from time to time throughout my career. One day I defeated the Portuguese Joaquim Durão in a tournament. A great Cuban teacher said: «If I had lost to a woman, I could not return to Cuba». In one of the following rounds I had to play against the Cuban. And I hit him. Fortunately, I also experienced beautiful moments. On March 8, 1990, I found a chocolate bar next to the card table. It was a gift from my rival, Mikhail Tal, on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
The feminist chess movement has a prominent figure in Anna Cramling Bellón, the daughter of Juan and Pia from Malaga. Anna is a good chess player. There is a picture of her moving the pieces in Benalmádena Chess Club as a child. At the recent Olympic Games in Chennai, Anna represented Sweden together with her mother (first board) and her father (team captain), a unique family event in the world. However, she prefers to enjoy the noble game in her own way and found encouragement in the spread and social dimension of chess. His YouTube channel has hundreds of thousands of followers. “For us, as parents, it’s a pride. We are very happy with the path Anna has taken,” confesses Pia. And Juan nods, with a round, complicit smile.
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
