For a chess player in the middle of a tournament, Sara Khadem smiles a lot. Plenty of players will tell you how much joy they get out of playing the sport of 64 squares. But come tournament time, most players enter a zone of brooding grimness which they refuse to exit even when they’re not actually playing on the board. Meals are had in hotel rooms. Interview requests are politely rebuffed. Even eye contact with the world is reduced. Sara, on the other hand, comes across as a breath of fresh air, laughing at jokes with her friends during meals, happy to chat away after games.
“I have been happy even in my worst tournaments,” laughs Sara when asked how she manages to be at ease even in the middle of a tournament as prestigious as Norway Chess — which by her own admission, is the ‘strongest women’s tournament she has participated in’. “I might smile, but I might be upset about the game also. But in general, I feel like my life isn’t dependent on these games because I’m a happy person in general. If I win this tournament, and if you tell me my life would change, I’d say, ‘No, no, it won’t.’
“(Winning or losing) is not the end of the world. I have had good tournaments. I have had bad ones. It all passes,” says the 28-year-old who understands fully well that life holds the capacity to inflict much harsher cuts than your king getting checkmated.
Just days after this conversation, Sara, whose full name is Sarasadat Khademalsharieh, took down Lei Tingjie in round 4 at Norway Chess with black pieces. Sara, who is the only international master competing in the Norway Chess tournament, has seen her life upended a few times over the past decade. The Iran-born player made global headlines in December 2022 when she opted not to wear a hijab during the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships. It was a stand she took partly to protest the custodial death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested by the morality police in Tehran.
Amini’s death led to unprecedented street protests in Iran. Sara’s decision to play without the headscarf angered the powers that be and it led to her exile from the country she loved because there was an arrest warrant issued by Iranian authorities against her in January 2023. It was the final nail. Her husband, Ardeshir Ahmadi, who is a filmmaker, TV host and businessman, had spent three months in an Iranian prison in 2015. Sara had also reportedly had her passport confiscated by Iranian authorities for a few months in the past.
“In my chess career I had reached a point that maybe I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” she admits. “I was a very motivated player, but at some point I had a travel ban from the Iranian government so I couldn’t travel for six months. That was at a point when I was collecting my GM norms, where I was at my peak rating. Then COVID happened, after that I had my baby and we immigrated. These were a lot of changes in my life that made me go very slowly, even backwards! I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue this. But I think tournaments like these give me motivation.”
In another country, Sara would have been toasted for her success on the board. She had won the under-12 World Youth Chess Championship just four years after moving her first chess piece. She was also the under-16 World Blitz Chess Champion in 2013, and the under-20 runner-up in classical chess in 2014 when she was 17.
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“I was getting support from the people but when you cannot even travel because your own government bans you and they tell you your whole career doesn’t matter because we are thinking of something else, then you will reach a point where you don’t want to stay,” she says. “I wouldn’t say Iranian chess players were not getting support. Chess is better there than many other countries. Changing the federation was very difficult, because I like to play for Iran, I liked my country, it wasn’t about the country.”
In one of those moments of frustration, Sara says he told her husband that she will come work with him.
“He was like, ‘but what will you do?’ I was going to his office, because I couldn’t stay home. I had stopped looking at chess. I was thinking, what else can I do with my life? And then COVID happened. But still, taking away your passport is something no one would want,” she adds.
Sara is now piecing together her chess career once more after transferring her chess federation from Iran to Spain in July 2023. She laughs as she informs that she has a young boy at home, called Sam, who is angry at her at the moment because she is away playing chess. She says her quest now is to find a balance between chess and her family.
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“This is the first long tournament that I’m playing after a long time. I don’t want to miss the first years with my son. I know a lot of players care about their careers a lot, but I want to make a balance,” she says with a smile.
