Once again, National Spelling Bee ends in a tie
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned co-champions Thursday for the second year in a row.
Vanya Shivashankar, 13, of Olathe, Kansas, and Gokul Venkatachalam, 14, of Chesterfield, Mo., battled head to head, conquering seemingly impossible words with each passing round.
Vanya's win carries some history as well. Before her performance Thursday, no sibling of a previous champion had ever won. Vanya's sister, Kavya, won the 2009 bee.
Vanya dedicated her win to her grandmother, who died in 2013.
"All she really wanted was her grandkids to do so well and I hope I make her happy with this," Vanya said.
Of his victory, Gokul said, "I saw the past two champions and I wanted the do the same and I wanted to get the same. I just put in the work."
Before last year, two spellers hadn't shared the championship since 1962. This year was the fifth time the bee crowned co-champions.
In addition to an engraved trophy, Vanya and Gokul will each receive $35,000, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, a complete reference library and other prizes.
Ten finalists who took the stage Thursday night in front of a packed ballroom and an ESPN audience. By the 11th round, Gokul and Vanya were the last two left.
They had contrasting styles as they battled into the 20th – and final -- round.
Vanya was upbeat and unfailingly polite, often asking questions about roots, pronunciations and definitions. She had the posture of a ballet dancer as she enunciated each letter with obvious confidence.
Gokul took an understated approach, with his hands usually at hips and shoulders hunched. He asked fewer questions, and often rattled off his answers.
Experience mattered. It was Vanya's fifth year at the bee and Gokul's fourth.
Vanya's words included "thamakau," "hippocrepiform," and "scherenschnitte." Gokul matched her by acing words such as "sprachgefühl," "pipsissewa," and "pyrrhuloxia."
It wasn't until Gokul spelled "nunatak"— essentially exhausting the championship word list -- that they were crowned co-winners. Had he misspelled it, Vanya would have had a chance to spell one more word on the list to claim the prize alone.
More than 11 million spellers participated in regional bees to yield the 283 who began this year's national bee on Tuesday.
The spellers ranged in age from from 9 to 15.
All the spellers took a written spelling and vocabulary test on Tuesday. Competitors encountered a range of challenging words during Wednesday's two oral rounds, including "longiloquence," "zamzumim," and "Gesamtkunstwerk."
The field was winnowed to 49 for the start of Thursday's semifinals, based in part on Tuesday's written test. Twenty-one semifinalists correctly spelled their way through Thursday's two oral rounds, but only 10 made it to the finals based on Tuesday's test and another written test taken after Wednesday's oral rounds.
Dev Jaiswal of Mississippi, a crowd favorite, was No. 1 going into the semifinals, but he stumbled over "iridocyclitis" in Round 9. The word refers to inflammation of the iris and the ciliary body.
"I've blown my own mind. I'll be happy wherever I place tonight,'' Dev, an eighth-grader at Winston Academy in Louisville, Miss., said before the finals started. "It's just a great honor to be here.''
Watch the winning moment in a full 360-degree view. In the special player below, mouse or swipe left or right to explore the panorama.Note, the player is optimized for desktop viewing and not currently playable in all versions of the USA TODAY mobile app.
Contributing: Deborah Barfield Berry, USA TODAY
