Harini Logan, 14, from San Antonio, Texas, holds the Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy, Thursday, June 2, 2022, at Oxon Hill, Md.
Jose Luis Magana / AP
hide captions
switch captions
Jose Luis Magana / AP
Harini Logan, 14, from San Antonio, Texas, holds the Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy, Thursday, June 2, 2022, at Oxon Hill, Md.
Jose Luis Magana / AP
OXON HILL, Md. – Harini Logan continues to try to learn from her near misses in online spellings. Recognized as one of the best players in the English language for many years, she has never taken home a national title.
In the biggest of them all, she suffered a new set of setbacks, but somehow, in the end, she was still there.
Harini was eliminated, then reinstated, in the controversial multiple-choice vocabulary round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She misspelled it four times because Scripps’ most cryptic words proved too much for her and Vikram Raju, who was also wrong four times in the ending. And then she finally took out Vikram in the first round tiebreak of the bee on Thursday night.
Call her spelled version “The Revenant.”
Her longtime trainer, Grace Walters, said: “Harini died and returned to her bee spelling experience.
The 14-year-old 8th grader from San Antonio, Texas, who competed in the last fully live bee-shooting contest three years ago and endured the pandemic to make his comeback, has correctly spelled 21 words in 90 Spell seconds, beat Vikram six. The word victory, according to Scripps, is “moorhen”, which means the offspring of the red partridge, because that is the word that moved Vikram in her past.
Over the past few months, Harini had been preparing carefully for the possibility of a flash ring, a pattern in which she felt uncomfortable.
“Honestly, when it was introduced last year, I was a bit appalled,” Harini said. “I’m slow. That’s my business. I don’t know how I would go in that context.”
Harini, an audience favorite for his poise and positivity, won more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. She was the first Scripps champion recovered in the competition. And that was before her four belated stumbles.
“I think it would be easy for me to get discouraged, like, ‘Wow, why do I feel so flawed? “. “Really just focusing on the next word and knowing that I’m still in, I think that’s just a huge relief for me.”
She is the fifth Scripps champion to be coached by Walters, a former Texas hunter, fellow and student at Rice University who is considering giving up coaching. Harini also got help from Navneeth Murali, who awarded her one of the runners-up in the online SpellPundit 2020 – a consolation prize for the Scripps bee that was canceled due to the pandemic.
Kirsten Tiffany Santos, 11, from Richmond, Texas, reacts during the final of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Thursday, June 2, 2022, in Oxon Hill, Md.
Alex Brandon / AP
hide captions
switch captions
Alex Brandon / AP
Kirsten Tiffany Santos, 11, from Richmond, Texas, reacts during the final of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Thursday, June 2, 2022, in Oxon Hill, Md.
Alex Brandon / AP
It was Walters and Navneeth who rushed to judge the bee, along with Harini’s mother, Priya, as soon as Harini stepped off the stage in the vocabulary round, she seemed the most frustrated of all.
“My heart stopped beating for a second,” Harini said.
Harini defines the word “pullulation” as the nests of birds that are mating. Scripps says the correct answer is bees. Her supporters took the case to the judges that she did the right thing. A few minutes later, referee Mary Brooks announced the reversal.
“We did a little bit after you were done, which is our job, to make sure we made the right decision,” Brooks said. “We went a little deeper into that word and actually the answer you give to that word is considered correct, so we’ll reinstate you.”
From there, Harini stormed into the final against Vikram. Each person spelled two words correctly. Then, Scripps delivered the most difficult words of the night.
Both are misspelled. Then Vikram missed again and Harini was “sereh” right, putting her one word out of the title. The word was “drimys,” and she was wrong.
Two more rounds, two more words for each misspelled word, and Scripps brought the podium and whistle for the flash ring that all the finalists had rehearsed in the nearly empty ballroom hours earlier.
Harini was faster and sharper throughout, and the final panel of judges confirmed her win.
“I knew I only had to spell the words from scratch that I could think of, and I just had to be a little bit faster,” says Vikram, 12, a 7th and 12th grader from Aurora, Colorado. who hopes to return next year.
13-year-old Vihaan Sibal from McGregor, Texas, finished third and has a year left of qualifying. Saharsh Vuppala, a 13-year-old eighth grader from Bellevue, Washington, came in fourth.
The final completely live version of the bee has no tether and ends with an eight-way match. The bee returned last year in a mostly virtual form, with only 11 finalists gathering in Florida as the Zaila Avant-garde became the first black American champion.
Harini is Indian-American, continuing a trend that has persisted for two decades – 21 of the previous 23 champions have South Asian heritage.
Another change for this year’s bee: Scripps ends a deal with longtime partner ESPN and produces its own TV show for the ION and Bounce networks, featuring the cast and literacy advocate LeVar Burton as host. Transitions were difficult at times, with long and uneven commercials disrupting the action and audio glitches, leaving the broadcast’s inner workings exposed. with the crowd.
The bees themselves have gotten thinner, with less than half of the participants in 2019 because of donors dropping out and the elimination of the wild card program. And the addition of live vocabulary questions in the semi-finals and finals resulted in unexpected disqualification.
Harini bowing to a brief vocabulary was the biggest shock of all.
“In the end, it was all worth it,” Walters said. “Every second place. Every achievement. Every tear. All. This is the ending Harini deserves.”
