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Oxon Hill, Maryland – The Scripps National Spelling Bee was knelt on Thursday night on Friday night by eight orthographies too balanced, too prepared and too savvy to dismiss any word. Faced with an increasingly restricted list of words and a group of spellings that showed no weaknesses, Scripps dropped out and declared them co-champions, the most extraordinary conclusion in the history of the competition, which lasts 94 years.
The eight co-champions correctly spelled the last 47 words of their historic victory, going through five perfect rounds. The competition had 20 rounds in all.
"Champions, we are now in unknown territory", said the pronoun bee Jacques Bailly announcing the decision to allow eight winners to the maximum. "We still have a lot of words on our list, but we will soon be running out of words that may challenge you, the most phenomenal collection of super spellers in the history of this competition."
He was not lying. The bee held three more rounds after that, and no one missed a word or even seemed to struggle.
Earlier, he said: "We are launching the dictionary on you and, until now, you are showing the dictionary who is the boss," noted the Reuters news agency.
The winners, six boys and two girls from Alabama, California, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas, were between the ages of 12 and 14 and called themselves "octo champions." The winners were:
- Rishik Gandhasri
- Erin Howard
- Saketh Sundar
- Shruthika Padhy
- Sohum Sukhatankar
- Abhijay Kodali
- Christopher Serrao
- Rohan Raja.
Patrick Semansky / AP
Although the bee decided to split the first and second place silver in the event of a tie, these plans were quickly canceled and each speller was awarded the total prize of 50 $ 000. The event, which lasted three days, began with 562 competitors from the United States and six other nations, Reuters said.
From 2014-2016, the bee ended with the co-champions. In 2017 and last year, the bee passed a spelling and vocabulary test that allowed her to identify a single champion if needed. This did not prove to be necessary and the bee managers decided that the test was too restrictive and got rid of it.
The warning signs of a stalemate at the summit came earlier Thursday, when the first final rounds, designed to reduce the number of players from 50 to about a dozen spells, took five and a half hours and again brought a solid group of 16 children. in the final.
The rules of the bee did not require more than three spellings to share the title. The possibility of four or more winners was not considered until Thursday. Paige Kimble, executive director of the bee, said that bee officials had developed an emergency plan for several champions after assessing the performance of the attackers in the final final heats.
"When we started to understand the courage of our finalists, we started thinking about what could possibly happen tonight," said Kimble. "We came in the evening with the plan we performed tonight."
Each winner had the chance to celebrate individually after giving his final word, although some are more demonstrative than others. Shruthika, 13, from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, staggered to the microphone before uttering her last words. After her last word, she returned to her chair and rocked the hands of her co-champions wearily.
Sohun, a 13-year-old from Dallas, told the group how pleased he was with the result.
"Orthopedic machines are improving – it's natural and the speed at which people improve is amazing," said Sohun, former winner of the North-South Foundation's spelling competition and the Aspirant spelling of Southeast Asia. "Everyone is learning, everyone is much better."
But there were murmurs of discontent. Naysa Modi, the finalist of last year who had surprisingly missed the final because of her score at the preliminary written test, was in tears when the confetti fell.
"I'm really disappointed I missed the final with a mustache, and to better rub the wound even more, I knew every word they've asked for today since this morning," he said. Naysa said in a text message. "However, I feel that the eight champions have deserved and I would like to congratulate them."
And the consensus among spelling experts in the crowd is that Scripps has not nearly exhausted the dictionary words that can challenge the best spelling.
"This would never happen in my bee," said Rahul Walia, founder of the South Asian Spelling Bee, where Sohum defeated Abhijay for the title last year. "They have to use harder words, words are available."
The majority of the spells had personal trainers and 13 out of 16 word lists and study papers compiled by the ex-spellings Shobha Dasari and his younger brother, Shourav. Shobha, who is 18 and will be visiting Stanford in the fall, said the proliferation of private coaches and online study guides has simplified spell-checking, but she did congratulate the champions.
"The children still have to work," Shobha said.
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