Sébastien.
Une explication qui est rapportée est celle de la lettre du manager de Kramnik, Carsten Hensel:
The reasons that Mr. Kramnik is entering his own bathroom often is simple: The restroom is small and Mr. Kramnik likes to walk and therefore uses the space of the bathroom as well. The Appeals Committee has been informed about the issue before they decided. It should also be mentioned that Mr. Kramnik has to drink a lot of water during the games.
Chacun son point de vue, mais personnellement ça me va (et svp arrêtons de parler de 50 fois; c'est un chiffre qui a été lancé en l'air par Danailov. Peut-on s'entendre pour "un nombre de fois inhabituel"?)
Bon, le changement de toilettes maintenant. Kramnik souligne que la décision s'est faite de façon unilatérale, sur des allégations à peine voilées de tricherie.
Une meilleure façon de procéder selon moi aurait été de convoquer Topalov et Kramnik pour discuter de la question. Si Kramnik ne veut rien entendre, alors le comité d'appel aurait été justifié de prendre une décision. Une décision
impartiale, il va sans dire.
Le GMI John Nunn a des mots plus durs que Seirawan envers le fameux comité d'appel, et écorche au passage Topalov. Des extraits de son texte suivent (mais ou sont donc les GMI qui appuient le point de vue de Topalov?)
In many disputes between top chess players, there is no clear right and wrong – forming a clear opinion from the letters of protest, contradictions and mutual accusations is virtually impossible. However, the Kramnik-Topalov case is an exception...
To avoid any suspicion of favouritism, it would have made sense for all the match officials to be clearly independent and unbiased...
The first extraordinary act was the handing over of the video of Kramnik in his rest room to Topalov’s team. This could easily be used against Kramnik, for example by seeing if he looked agitated after a particular move in the opening. This act was so obviously wrong that one can hardly imagine it being committed by an unbiased person.
Next was the ‘toilet protest’ from Topalov’s team. Notice that not only has Kramnik not been proved to have done anything wrong, there isn’t even a single piece of evidence that he has done anything wrong. All he has done, apparently, is to wander in and out of his bathroom – a bathroom which, one must remember, was open to inspection at any time before the game.
However, this didn’t stop the Appeals Committee from deciding to lock Kramnik’s bathroom. This may not sound such a serious matter, but chess at the highest level is largely about psychology and the imposition of your will on the opponent. Achieving this away from the chessboard could easily be the first step towards doing the same on the board itself. The organisers have stated that they do not believe Kramnik is cheating; in that case, where is the logic in punishing Kramnik by making a decision that is so obviously favourable to Topalov? Moreover, Topalov declared that he would not shake hands with Kramnik. There is no requirement in the Laws of Chess that the players shake hands before the game, but not to do so is a substantial insult.
It is hard to avoid the impression that Topalov’s team realised that it would be an uphill struggle to win two games from eight (and against a player who went 15 games without loss against Garry Kasparov!) and decided to launch a psychological attack. Such tactics are far from unknown in top-level chess, but they are usually frustrated by the fair and common-sense approach of match officials, an approach which has been notably lacking in Elista. Not only was the actual decision of the Appeals Committee clearly wrong, it was also wrong to start Game 5 without any kind of agreement between the players. The result has been to plunge the whole match into crisis, since now that Topalov has been awarded Game 5 by default, it is hard to see him playing it again.
