The Scripps National Spelling Bee is won by Harini Logan, a 14-year-old from Texas.
Harini Logan, 14, of San Antonio, has won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2022, after the competition was so close that the winner had to be determined by a first-ever’spell-off.’
She beat Vikram Raju, 12, of Denver, in the Bee on Thursday night, after a neck-and-neck competition prompted a tiebreaking lightning round to declare the winner, a first in the show’s history.
“It was really just getting into that attitude where I could have that, just tranquility where I could focus on the words rather than being stressed out,” Harini told GMA after winning.
Harini receives $50,000 from Scripps, as well as other cash prizes and Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica reference books.
Vikram will receive a prize of $25,000 for coming in second place.
The two kids won the 94th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, which featured spellers ages 7 to 15 from all around the United States and as far away as Guam.
The tournament this year took place in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Then, in the bee’s first-ever lightning-round tiebreaker, she eventually defeated Vikram. The winning word in the competition was’moorhen,’ which is a small aquatic bird of the rail family.
After winning, Harini stated, “It’s my fourth time at the Bee, and this is just such a dream — and well, I’m just overwhelmed.”
‘With her spelling bee adventures, Harini has been to hell and back,’ said Grace Walters, her longtime coach.
Harini, who was always well-prepared, had been practicing for the prospect of a lightning round, a format she disliked.
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To be honest, I was a little scared when it was first launched last year,’ Harini added. ‘I move slowly. That’s how I roll. I wasn’t sure how I’d do in that situation.’
Harini is the first-ever Scripps champion to be restored during the competition, and she is a crowd favorite for her poise and positivism. That was before she made her four late stumbles.
‘I think it would have been really easy for me to get deterred, to get sort of like, `Wow, why am I missing so much?´’ Harini said. ‘Really just focusing on the next word and knowing that I´m still in, I think was just a big relief for me.’
She is the fifth Scripps champion to be coached by Walters, a former speller, fellow Texan and student at Rice University who is considering bowing out of the coaching business.
Harini also got help from Navneeth Murali, who handed her one of those runner-ups in the 2020 SpellPundit online bee – a consolation prize for the Scripps bee that was canceled because of the pandemic.
It was Walters and Navneeth who rushed to the bee judges, along with Harini´s mom, Priya, as soon as Harini walked off the stage in the vocabulary round, seemingly her most crushing disappointment of all.
‘My heart stopped for a second,’ Harini said.
Harini defined the word ‘pullulation’ as the nesting of mating birds. Scripps said the correct answer was the swarming of bees. Her supporters made the case to the judges that she´d gotten it right. A few minutes later, head judge Mary Brooks announced the reversal.
‘We did a little sleuthing after you finished, which is what our job is, to make sure we´ve made the right decision,’ Brooks said. ‘We (did) a little deep dive in that word and actually the answer you gave to that word is considered correct, so we´re going to reinstate you.’
Harini then cruised into the finals against Vikram. They each correctly spelt two words. Then Scripps said the night’s most vehement words.
Both of these words are misspelled. Vikram then missed again, but Harini got’sereh’ correct, putting her one word away from the title. The term was ‘drimys,’ and she mispronounced it.
After two more rounds, each of the finalists misspelled two more words, Scripps brought out the podium and buzzer for the lightning round, which all of the finalists had practiced in the mostly empty ballroom hours before.
Harini was faster and sharper throughout, and the judges’ final tally confirmed her victory.
‘I knew I just had to blurt off the spelling I could think of off the top of my head, and I just had to be a little faster,’ said Vikram, a 12-year-old seventh-grader from Aurora, Colorado, who hopes to return next year.
Vihaan Sibal, a 13-year-old from McGregor, Texas, finished third and also has another year of eligibility. Saharsh Vuppala, a 13-year-old eighth-grader from Bellevue, Washington, was fourth.
Most Bee contestants were middle-school age and all were required to test negative for COVID-19 to participate and were masked onstage except when actively competing.
Harini attends The Montessori School of San Antonio, where she is in eighth grade. She enjoys creative writing and hopes to publish a book during her senior year. She plays the piano, recorder, and is learning to play the ukulele when she is not spelling.
She was a Bee competitor for the fourth and last time.
Last year, Zaila Avant-garde, 14, of New Orleans, became the first African American to win the famous competition, which began in 1925, when she properly spelt ‘Murraya,’ a genus of plants.
The Bee was shown live on television. As players wrack their brains to come up with the correct spellings for often obscure words, play-by-play commentary adds to the intensity.
This year’s live program was transferred to ION and Bounce, both owned by a Scripps subsidiary, after 27 years of being televised live on the cable sports channel ESPN.
‘erysipelas,’ a skin infection; ‘auslaut,’ the final sound in a word or syllable; ‘palama,’ webbing on the feet of aquatic birds; ‘pendeloque,’ a pear-shaped gemstone or glass pendant; ‘odylic,’ related to a hypothetical life force; ‘cernuous,’ drooping; ‘bougainvillea,’ a climbing plant; and ‘