Champion crowned from record field
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, Texas, has been declared champion of the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee, winning on the word “koinonia.”
In doing so, the 14-year-old emerged the top speller from a record-shattering 515 contestants at the national bee, compared with 291 last year, after organizers expanded eligibility.
Along the way, he had to outlast a field of 16 finalists who vanquished words such as “Praxitelean,” “ispaghul” and “telyn” — sometimes without batting an eyelash — in a breathtaking show of spelling skill broadcast live on ESPN.
Nemmani also continued a longtime trend by becoming the 14th champion or cochampion of South Asian descent the bee has had in 11 consecutive years.
The 16 spellers took the stage Thursday night at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland to battle it out for the title of champion. The competition was, in a word, brutal. In the first round of ESPN-televised spelling, nearly half of the finalists misspelled their words, including several crowd favorites such as Tara Singh, a 13-year-old from Kentucky who was competing at her fifth and final national bee.
To even get to that point, the finalists had to survive nearly five hours of onstage spelling that started Thursday morning. Bee officials said the plan had been to whittle down the field to about a dozen contestants for the prime-time competition. It would take five rounds of onstage spelling to get to 16, the largest group ever to head into the championship finals.
The 16 finalists ranged in age from 11 to 14 and include nine girls and seven boys. The spellers come from all over the United States, plus one from Canada. And several had appeared at the national bee in previous years.
“I just try not to think about it,” said Naysa Modi, a 12-year-old from Dallas competing in her fourth national bee, when asked after the Thursday afternoon spelling rounds about whether she might be a favorite to win. “That’s too much pressure.”
Thursday had begun with 41 spellers who qualified for the finals after surviving what was arguably the most intense competition in the bee’s 93-year history.
This year, a record-shattering 516 spellers qualified — compared with 291 the year before — because of a new invitational program called “RSVBee,” which allows those who didn’t win a regional or state bee to still apply for the nationals if they had won their school bee or been a former national finalist.
The massive field of spellers began competing in earnest Tuesday by taking a written test so difficult that there were no perfect scores this year.
Of note, however: All five spellers who scored the highest on the test were among the 16 finalists.
That included Modi, from Texas; 14-yearold Sravanth Malla of New York; 14-year-old Karthik Nemmani of Texas; 12-year-old Shruthika Padhy of New Jersey; and 12-yearold Aisha Randhawa of Riverside, Calif.
The winner of the bee receives $40,000 and a trophy from the Scripps Bee, a $2,500 cash prize (and a complete reference library) from Merriam-Webster, trips to New York and Hollywood as part of a media tour, and a pizza party for their school.