Russian Chess Prodigy Dies After Jason Bourne-Style Balcony Leap

In his games of chess, young grandmaster Yuri Eliseev was not afraid to try bold maneuvers. The Daily Telegraph, reporting from the February Aeroflot Open chess tournament in Moscow, described the 20-year-old Russian prodigy as a "relative unknown" who "was declared winner on tie-break even after losing this hair-raising encounter where both sides promote a pawn to produce a position with four queens on the board."

Eliseev racked up several victories in his short career. In Maribor, Slovenia, in 2012, he won the under-16 group. By age 17, he had achieved the title of grandmaster.



The coach of the national Russian chess team, Sergei Yanovsky, told the BBC that "even as a young boy" the chess wunderkind "always wanted to show his daring and climb to places." Outside of the competition halls, Eliseev enjoyed the sport of parkour, scaling walls and performing acrobatic maneuvers. Yanovsky said that Eliseev would walk along the edge of 6-foot-tall walls to show off his sense of balance.

The grandmaster's fearlessness, however, ultimately cost him his life. On Saturday, while attempting to climb from a 12th story balcony, Eliseev slipped.

Parkour, invented by a Parisian teenager named David Belle, is the sport of vaulting across rooftops, structures and other urban obstacles. (Practitioners, called traceurs, can be seen in movies like "Casino Royale." The sport was also parodied in an episode of "The Office.") It can be a dangerous activity, with scattered medical case studies of traceurs who suffered spinal cord damage and other injuries. Deaths are rare but not unheard of; a professional stuntman died in 2014 while attempting a parkour jump from a fourth-story window of his Lisbon hostel.

Yanovsky called Eliseev "a very talented chess player, a very bright lad, he was always very popular in the team," according to the BBC. The coach added that the 20-year-old "always sought unusual methods in everything, he had a predilection for unorthodox solutions . . . This is a very heavy loss."

Russian authorities said the 20-year-old fell from the 12th floor of an apartment in Moscow, the Associated Press reported. His friend and a fellow competitive chess player, Daniil Dubov, wrote on the Russian-based social network VK that, in an attempt to swing from a window to a neighbor's balcony, Eliseev lost his grip and plummeted.

Russian investigators were still trying to piece together what had happened, according to CNN, though it was clear Eliseev died at the scene. Friends in the apartment, they said, witnessed his fall.

Eliseev was a "close friend, a brilliant chess player," Dubov wrote, and "one of the most talented people I know."



Washington Post