A.Yanjindulam loses world title despite breaking record

Memory athlete A.Yanjindulam, known as Yanjaa, won a silver medal at the World Memory Championships, which took place from December 14 to 16 in Vienna, Austria.

Yanjaa set a new world record by memorizing 413 images in five minutes. However, it was German memory athlete Johannes Mallow that became the world champion.

After the competition, Yanjaa expressed her disappointment with the organization of the competition on her Facebook page.

She wrote, “I just placed second at the World Memory Championships. I even got the world record in images, 413 in five minutes. I’m not happy about it. It’s not a true win when you feel personally attacked and sabotaged. Conscious malice or willful ignorance, the consequences are the same and I feel robbed of a win. I wouldn’t have called myself ‘the world memory champion’ after this small competition, because it’s not fair when half of the best competitors in the world can’t attend because the organizer chose to host it somewhere where visas aren’t granted easily to Asians.”

“To be questioned on my integrity, my sense of morality and get comments on my behavior throughout the competition was, to put it delicately, some bullsh*t. At one point, the main organizer even scolded me for turning the memorization page one second too fast, to give you just an idea of the differential treatment I had to endure. Death by a thousand cuts, a loss by a thousand micro aggressions. That, among other things, made it feel less world-class and more like an ol’ European competition where most of the very few competitors were white men.”