Cooper Komatsu, 13, of Culver City correctly spells “myoclonus” during the final round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Md., on Thursday.
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A fifth-grade student from Leander ISD has been crowned co-champion of the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington. Throughout the day Thursday, the tough word list whittled down the 45 remaining sepllers, as they missed toughies like Cheltenham, psyllium, and cacomistle, heard the dreaded ding and headed to the “cookie couch”, where the losers consoled themselves with treats. The result was the same.
Jairam’s brother Sriram competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2008, 2009, 2011 (tied for 6 place), 2013 (tied for 3rd place) and 2014 (co-champion).
After the back-to-back ties, Scripps chose to change the rules for 2016 to challenge spellers with more hard words and to increase the number of championship rounds for this year’s competition.
An Austin fifth-grader, Nihar Janga, became co-champion along with a NY student after dozens of rounds of words.
The contest offers prizes ranging from a Kindle to $40,000 in cash.
Vigorous preparation for this spelling bee began back in August 2013, Robson said.
Sylvie’s appearance on primetime was brief past year as she missed her first word.
The bee this year included qualifiers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Bahamas, Canada, Europe, Ghana, Guam, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, South Korea and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She was able to correctly spell the word “ayurveda”, a traditional Hindu system of medicine, as well as “sylvilagus”. I can’t say anything. “I didn’t expect to get this far”, Nihar said.
Thirteen-year-old Snehaa Kumar of Folsom, California, who finished tied for fourth last year, also had some unsteady moments, her voice breaking in front of the microphone. They’re all young Cam Newton’s, just dabbing on them folks when they spell “condignly” without missing that “g”.
Dev Jaiswal, who made the top 10 previous year and is back as a spectator, had a glassy-eyed look on his face as he tried to sum up what his friends had been through.
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Cooper qualified for the national bee on March 15 by winning the Los Angeles County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee for the second consecutive year. It was the first time the Bee had ended in a draw for more than a half century, and then Vanya Shivashankar, 13, (“scherenschnitte”) and Gokul Venkatachalam, 14, (“nunatak”) did it again the next year.
