“I’m just speechless”, said Nihar, of Austin, Texas, who was competing in his first bee. The two found themselves locked in an epic spell-down that lasted over 16 rounds and two glorious hours, before the judges themselves threw in the towel and gave the two young geniuses a shared win.
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Thirteen-year-old Jairam is the younger brother of the 2014 co-champion, Sriram Hathwar.
But Nihar wasn’t ideal, and he stumbled at just the wrong time – or perhaps the right time. Snehaa and Sylvie are 13-year-old eighth-graders who have exhausted their bee eligibility. Twice, Jairam missed a word, giving Nihar a chance to seal the title.
Both Jairam and Nihar said they knew some of the words they were given and figured out the spelling of the rest. Both spellers said they were glad to share the experience of being champions together.
A student from Culver City Middle School has advanced through the early rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals and will appear in Thursday night’s main event.
The finals ended in a tie for the third consecutive year Thursday night, with Jairam Hathwar and Nihar Janga declared co-champions after a roller-coaster finish. After back-to-back years of co-champs, the Bee changed the rules to make it more hard to produce co-champs.
Their winning words? Hathwar expertly spelled “Feldenkrais”, a somatic educational system, while Janga won with “gesellschaft”, which refers to social relations based on impersonal ties.
The national spelling bee is the largest and longest-running education promotion in the United States. “I mean, I’m only in fifth grade”.
He then correctly spelled the word, bringing cheers from the crowd.
“He did pretty good for a first-grader”, Nihar said.
Jairam plans to study medicine at Harvard, and Nihar wants to be a neurosurgeon. Thursday’s finale ran well past 10.30pm EST as the ten finalists, seven of them Indian-American, held a nationwide audience in thrall with their verbal prowess.
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Indian-American kids have now won 14 of the last 18 championships, leading an ESPN writer to call them the “New England Patriots of the Spelling Bee”, after a champion American football team.
