A promising chess grandmaster has plunged to his death from a Moscow apartment block in what appeared to have been a feat of daring gone wrong.
Yuri Yeliseyev, 20, fell from the 12th storey on Saturday, dying of his injuries before an ambulance arrived. Authorities are investigating the death.
Yeliseyev was reportedly a fan of parkour, an urban sport also known as freerunning, which involves climbing or jumping up walls, across roofs and over fences and other buildings.
Daniil Dubov, a fellow grandmaster, wrote on social media that his friend had been trying to climb from a window to a nearby balcony but slipped. Yeliseyev’s flatmate, Shamil Arslanov, who was in a different room at the time, told Ren TV that “Yuri loved extreme things” and had previously climbed between the window and the balcony.
A neighbour told the Life channel that Yeliseyev had been seen performing the stunt over the summer. A social media account photo showed him hanging by his hands from a ledge high above the ground.
Yeliseyev won a world junior chess championship in 2012 and became a grandmaster in 2013. He won this year’s Moscow Open and was ranked 212th by the World Chess Federation.
His death has shocked the chess world and made national headlines in a country that reveres the game. The tragedy came just before the final world chess championship match on Monday between the title-holder, Magnus Carlsen, and the Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin.
The Russian deputy prime minister, Vitaly Mutko, expressed his condolences and said Yeliseyev was “very talented. He could have brought a lot of benefit to his sport and his country”.
Coaches and acquaintances described Yeliseyev as an idiosyncratic player and personality. The national chess team coach, Sergei Yanovsky, told state news agency R-Sport that Yeliseyev was one of the most talented young grandmasters in Russia and praised his “colourful individuality”.
“His uniqueness and search for his own path was very evident in all his decisions; he rejected any existing blueprints,” Yanovsky said.
“Even as a boy he always wanted to show off his fearlessness and climb up on something, but not to this extreme level,” he added.
