The last two Bees resulted in ties, and this one ended in a similar fashion.
The Scripps Spelling Bee was filled with intense moments, some heartbreaks, and a lot dabbing. The Finals were a little more intense with fewer festivities happening. The ten finalists went up on stage and spelled until they were eliminated.
The event began with Cooper Komatsu from Los Angeles. Myoclonus was his word. After pondering about it for a few minutes, he spelled the word out even though it seemed like he had given up hope.
Jashun Paluru was the first contestant eliminated with the word Vasopressin. Vasopressin, whose origin is from a trademark, has one more s than Paluru provided.
The last three contestants were Jairam Hathwar from New York, Nihar Janga from Texas and Snehaa Ganesh Kumar from California.
Kumar was the first of three eliminated after misspelling the word usucapion, which is a mode of acquiring title to property. This was her last attempt at winning the Bee.
Both Jairam and Nihar looked like they had no weakness. The two traded back words with incredible certainty. It seemed that as the words became more difficult, the contestants became more confident. At that point, they no longer relied on aspects like language of origin; they just flat out knew the words.
The Spelling Bee theatrics were in full force. While Jairam spelled drahthaar incorrectly, Nihar simply shook his head in the background as though he already knew his fate. All Nihar needed to do was spell two more words correctly.
He spelled rafraichissoir correctly, but he got ayacahuite wrong. As a result, Jairam got another chance to redeem himself.
After a few rounds, Jairam spelled mischsprache wrong. And just like the last time Nihar just shook his head. But just like the first time, Nihar misspelled a word himself. In the end, the competition went to the 25th round without any more misspellings, which meant that the two competitors would be crowned co-champions.
Jairam and Nihar celebrated with the rest of the competitors as confetti showered the stage.
And despite the competitiveness between the children, they're all friends. During the broadcast, one of the competitors revealed that they are all on a group chat to talk spelling. It's great to see that all these sesquipedalian word spellers are still having fun.