The format for the 1989 renewal of the Irish Championship provoked a bit of controversy at the time. The Irish Chess Union abandoned the usual formula of one-game a day over 9 rounds and compressed the Championship into 5 days. It was held at the Gresham Hotel, Dublin from Wednesday 12 to Sunday 16 July, with two games on the Wednesday and the Friday. Niall Carton from Newcastle, County Down finished with a score of 6.0 to win by a point from Philip Short, Tom Clarke and Gerry O’Connell.
Carton could, of course, only turn up and do his best whatever the format but he also proved himself under the traditional conditions when the won the 1993 Championship, also held in Dublin – from 10-18 July in the Teachers Club. This time he scored 7 points out of 9 with Colm Daly second on 6.5 and Joe Ryan third another half-point away. The 1989 controversy had not been forgotten. The report in the December 1993 Irish Chess Journal had the headline “Niall The Nine Round Hostage” and contained this passage in the text:
“This is Niall’s second title, his first being from the infamous “short” event of 1989 (it was played over seven rounds), but this victory confirms that he is a worthy nine round champion.”
The games from the 1993 Championship are not hard to find in the usual database sources, but the same does not apply to those from 1989. So here is a Carton victory from the earlier of his two successes.
Niall Carton – Joe Ryan
Irish Championship, Dublin 1989
Play through the game
After 28. d5
1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Nd5 3.d4 d6 4.Nf3 g6 5.Bc4 Nb6 6.Bb3 Bg7 7.Ng5 e6 8.f4 dxe5 9.fxe5 c5 10.c3 cxd4 11.cxd4 0-0 12.0-0 Nc6 13.Be3 Nd5 14.Bxd5 exd5 15.Nc3 f6 16.exf6 Bxf6 17.Nf3 Re8 18.Qd2 Bg4 19.Rad1 Qd7 20.h3 Bf5 21.Kh1 Be4 22.Nh2 Bg7 23.Ng4 Rf8 24.Bh6 Rxf1+ 25.Rxf1 Rf8
Probably the losing move. 25…Bf5 should leave White with only a slight advantage.
26.Rxf8+ Kxf8 27.Nxe4 dxe4 28.d5 Ne7
If 28…Nd8 29.Qb4+ wins: e.g. 29…Kf7 (29…Qe7 30.Bxg7+ scoops at least a Bishop) 30.Ne5+ forking King and Queen and if Black captures the Knight with 30…Bxe5 it’s 31.Qf8 checkmate. Best appears to be 28…e3 29.Bxg7+ Qxg7 30.Qxe3 Nd8 but with still a winning advantage for White.
29.Bxg7+ Kxg7 30.Qd4+ Kf7
Or 30…Kf8 31.Qf6+ Ke8 32.Qh8+ Ng8 33.Nf6+
31.Ne5+ 1-0
Carton appears to have given up competitive chess about two years after his second Irish title. In 1997 he starting working for ING Bank in London in the Market Risk department and was responsible for the Central European region including Russia. He was transferred to Moscow in 2007 to run the financial markets desk for the bank there. It was during the Russian winters that Niall discovered cross-country skiing and the idea for skiing to the pole took hold of him.
Alexey Borichev, one of his Russian colleagues, accompanied Carton to the North Pole in April 2011, and they managed to raise $80,000 for the Tula orphanage, mostly from the financial brokers in Moscow. Carton managed to trek all the way despite suffering a nasty injury:
“I trained for four months, got fit, everything was good, but during the first day on the ice I fell, it was a bad fall, we thought I had cracked a rib. I skied on for another 7 days, and made it to the pole. Five days after I got back to Moscow, I went to see the doctor and he told me that I had three broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung. Stupid Irishman kept going!”
Not long afterwards Niall started to plan a trip to the South Pole and among a group of fourteen, including Borichov, set off in early 2013. This time money was being raised for a charity called The Greater Chernobyl Cause whose purpose is to provide hospices for terminally ill people in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
“The plan was to ski the last degree of latitude, which is a distance of roughly one hundred kms, a trip which should take about 8 days. We were to fly from Chile to the Union Glacier base camp. We planned to live in tents, and pull the sleds ourselves, after all, using dogs is sort of cheating. Then back to the base camp of Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica at 4,892 metres, which we reckoned we could climb, which was quite ambitious as I for one have never climbed anything higher than Slieve Donard in Northern Ireland.”
The polar trek turned out harder than expected. The altitude and freezing temperatures led to constant headaches. The polar expedition needed to average 8 miles a day. While training in Russia, Carton was doing the that distance in 1 hours 45 minutes, without getting tired, but in Antarctica that same 8 miles took over 7 hours, leaving him absolutely exhausted. The last day was even more difficult, as Carton and rest of the team had to make detours around scientific experiments before reaching the South Pole and the Station there. Once again Carton did not escape unscathed:
“I woke up on my last day unable to see out of my right eye, I had very blurred vision. When we got back to the base camp, it was diagnosed as snow blindness. It took about five days to clear and it meant I couldn’t climb Vinson Massif.”
Not content with reaching both poles, Carton decided to undertake a further polar trip in April 2014 with his 15-year-old son James, who was hoping to become the youngest person to walk unaided to the North Pole, with Bernardos in Ireland being the charitable cause to benefit.
Unlike the solid, mainly flat terrain on the journey to the South Pole, the northern polar regions have shifting ice underfoot. The moving ice can work either for or against polar adventurers, bringing them closer to the Pole without them even moving, but the opposite can also occur. Unfortunately for Niall and James, the latter scenario played out for them. Having battled against bad weather, the Cartons battled against headwinds to make it to within five miles of the Pole on the penultimate day of their trek. They camped overnight but woke up the next morning to discover they had drifted 10 miles away and were faced with open water in trying to plot a route to the North Pole. Eventually James’s record attempt had to be abandoned and father and son were airlifted by helicopter to the North Pole for photographs.
At the North Pole
Sources for the polar expeditions commentary:
Meet our 2014 North Pole teams!
To the South Pole for charity
Newcastle boy bids to become youngest to walk to pole
Storms and drifting ice but James finally makes it to the North Pole
Photograph at the North Pole from the Facebook page of the Irish Embassy in Moscow