Idman.biz
Interview with Faiq Hasanov, Vice-President of the Azerbaijan Chess Federation, to İdman.biz
- The "Chess Club" program, which has been broadcast on Azerbaijan Television for 56 years, has been included in the "Guinness Book of Records" as the longest-running sports program on world television. If we go back 56 years, how do you remember the period when this program was created?
- In 1969, I was invited to AZTV and offered to create a chess program. As a result of joint discussions, we created the "Chess Club". When we started this project, our main goal was to increase the mass character of chess in the country. I suggested that we teach people chess through the program. Anyone could learn chess by watching this program. In each episode, we repeated the moves. So even if you didn't watch for two months, you could be aware of the previous programs by watching once. Later, we started holding competitions. There was great interest in this program from the audience. We received numerous letters from all over Azerbaijan. As time passed, the number of schools increased, and strong coaches grew up. Thus, the format of our program also changed. We were already inviting our strong chess players and champions to the program, and they were sharing their experiences with us.
- When did you take the first step to apply to the "Guinness Book of Records"?
- Actually, they had been telling me for a long time that the program has been going on for so long, it is time to get into the "Guinness Book of Records". A year ago, we started to seriously deal with this issue.
- Most likely, you had to wait so long because it was difficult to collect the necessary documents.
- Yes, this is an extremely difficult process. Imagine that we were able to achieve this after a year. I should also note that if I were alone, I would not have been able to do it. We were working on this as a team. Mahir Mammadov had created a good team in our federation, which he leads, regarding this issue. There were quite difficult requirements regarding the application. At that time, there was no archive because the program was broadcast live. You somehow had to prove that there was such a program.
- How did you prove it?
- Newspapers came to our aid. Especially, "Bakinskiy rabochiy". This newspaper has an archive formed since 1922. It published AZTV's weekly program. We collected information about the program from those newspapers. Then they asked us for live witnesses. These people had to be specialists working on television. After solving this, we extracted and presented copies of the programs from the AZTV archive materials created since 2005. Imagine a 20-year period and collecting two programs a month. It was quite a difficult process.
- Before that, your name was included in the "Guinness Book of Records" as the longest-serving referee. Did you apply for both at the same time?
- To be honest, I didn't remember refereeing at first. When I applied for the program, I saw that the processes were very complicated, and I thought it was not necessary. Suddenly I remembered that I had started refereeing before that. Let me apply for that. I refereed at the first international chess tournament held in Baku in 1964, and we also had the necessary documents related to refereeing at the world championships. Since it was a little easier, we put aside the "Chess Club" and switched to refereeing. In this work, the documents in the FIDE archive helped us a lot. Therefore, we first sent the application for refereeing, and then completed the "Chess Club". Finally, after long and complicated processes, we were able to achieve our goal.
Aytac Sahad
İdman.biz
