Spelling bee crowns 8 champs amid buzz it was too E-A-S-Y

OXON HILL, Md. — There were warning signs throughout a marathon day of spelling that this Scripps National Spelling Bee would not conclude like any other in the event’s 94-year history.

Rishik Gandharsi sensed it as he stepped to the microphone for the ninth round of Thursday night’s prime-time finals, when he was one of eight spellers remaining onstage. “Just out of curiosity,” Rishik asked pronouncer Jacques Bailly, “do you happen to know what time it is?”

It was 11:18 p.m. Fortyfive minutes later, Rishik was a champion. So was Erin Howard. So were Saketh Sundar, Shruthika Padhy, Sohum Sukhantankar, Abhijay Kodali, Christopher Serrao and, finally, Rohan Raja. The eight co-champions closed out the bee by spelling 47 consecutive words correctly.

Erin was the first champion without South Asian heritage since Evan O’Dorney in 2007.

All eight received the full winner’s freight of $50,000 in cash and a new, customdesigned trophy, because Scripps simply could not come up with words difficult enough to challenge them.

There was plenty of concern after the bee ended in ties three years in a row, from 2014-2016, that the very best spellers might be too good for the bee. Scripps came up with a written tiebreaker test of both spelling and vocabulary. After two years in which the test wasn’t needed, bee officials decided it was too burdensome on the spellers and got rid of it.

The rules going into this year’s bee called for, at most, three co-champions. A contingency plan for even more winners was developed on the fly Thursday afternoon, after bee officials evaluated spellers’ performance in the early final rounds.

It took more than 5 hours to narrow the field from 50 kids to 16.

“We didn’t go into the competition tonight not knowing that this was a possibility,” said Paige Kimble, the bee’s executive director.

Bailly, the longtime pronouncer and the public face of the bee, broke the news to a stunned crowd in a convention center ballroom outside Washington after the eight eventual champs had gone through two consecutive perfect rounds.

“Champion spellers, we are now in uncharted territory,” Bailly said.

There would be three rounds, Bailly said, and anyone who got through them would be a champion. No one came close to missing a word.

For the winners, fatigue was the only real concern.

“I’m very glad they stopped where they did,” said Shruthika, a 13-yearold from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

“I feel like there was no better way to do it,” said Saketh, who’s 13 and lives in Clarksville, Maryland. “I don’t know if I would’ve won if they kept going.”

But there were murmurs of discontent among the ex-spellers and spelling experts in the crowd. The words, they said, were just too easy. Naysa Modi, last year’s runner-up, was in tears as the confetti fell.

She said the winners were deserving, but the final words weren’t tough enough for them, or her.

Among the words that earned spellers a share of the title: “a u s l a u t ,” “palama,” “cernuous” and “odylic.”

“This would never happen at my bee,” said Rahul Walia, founder of the South Asian Spelling Bee, where Sohum defeated Abhijay for the title last year.