This year’s championship round was intentionally made more hard in order to prevent a marathon between the final two, which has happened in the past two consecutive spelling bees.
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She has one more shot at the big prize if she qualifies next year.
The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below, with contestants ranging in age from 6 to 15 years old. The third time was supposed to be the charm.
“I’ll try to work with you”, pronouncer Jacques Bailly joked. But it wasn’t enough.
He missed it by one letter, going with “solele”.
Mitchell Robson, who made the top 10, is friends with Tejas and was shocked by his exit.
“When I got my first word right, I didn’t know it and I was really happy that I got it right”, Cooper said to a reporter moments after his loss. “Now, I don’t have that edge over him to say, ‘Oh, at least I’ve won the spelling bee'”. I don’t think this was his swan song’. Five have competed once before, including Hathwar, and one had participated twice before. Snehaa takes home $20,000 for finishing third, and Sylvie Lamontagne of Lakewood, Colorado, got $10,000 for fourth place. She met many of them during last year’s bee, and they have kept in touch through group texts.
“I thought it was over, because Nihar is so strong, such a great speller”, Sriram said. ‘I’m trying to get past the dictionary. She substituted an “a” for the first “e”. She buried her face in her hands before spelling ‘sylvilagus, ‘ a cottontail rabbit. He still ended up winning, but sharing the title with 13-year-old Jariam Hathwar. But the 13-year-old made it through.
Jairam Hathwar and Nihar Janga will share the National Spelling Bee championship. “It is incredible their level of knowledge and composure”, said Vijay Reddy, Smrithi’s coach at GeoSpell Academy in Plano.
Sreeniketh Vogoti, a seventh-grader at Fruit Cove Middle School in St. Johns County, is the only Florida contestant who is still in the running, according to the competition’s website.
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The Scripps National Spelling Bee had all of the edge-of-the-seat excitement and nail-biting anxiety of any sporting event usually seen on ESPN, the sports network that aired the annual event.
