Bruhat Soma was unbeatable before he arrived at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and neither the dictionary, nor his competitors, nor a lightning-round tiebreaker challenged him on the way to victory.
Bruhat Soma wins the Scripps National Spelling Bee, spelling 29 words correctly in a lightning-round tiebreakerOXON HILL, Maryland --
The 12-year-old seventh-grader from Tampa, Florida, blitzed through 30 words in 90 seconds Thursday night, sounding more like an auctioneer than the best speller in the English language, and judges determined that he spelled 29 of them correctly - nine more than his competitor, Faizan Zaki. As the champion, Bruhat receives a trophy and more than $50,000 in cash and prizes.
The finals began with eight spellers, the fewest since 2010, and it was clear that Scripps was trying to fill the 2-hour broadcast window on Ion, a network owned by the Cincinnati-based media company. Frequent, lengthy commercial breaks allowed spellers to mill about at the side of the stage, chatting with their coaches, relatives and supporters.
The competition rules state that a spell-off is used in the interest of time, but Scripps still squeezed in another commercial break between the tiebreaker and the announcement of Bruhat's victory.Scripps said Bruhat's winning word was "abseil," defined as "descent in mountaineering by means of a rope looped over a projection above.
Coming into the competition, Bruhat won the Words of Wisdom bee hosted by Remer, a former speller and study guide author. He won the SpellPundit bee organized by that study guide company. And he won the first-ever online bee emceed by Dev, last year's Scripps champion. Bruhat is the second straight champion from the Tampa Bay area, and his victory means 29 of the last 35 spelling champs have been Indian American. His parents immigrated from the southern Indian state of Telangana, a region that's well-represented among the run of Indian American champions and contenders that began in 1999.
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