A few days have passed since NSB 2009, so I've had a few days to digest what happened. I actually got caught up in work starting wednesday, so I didn't so any of the preliminary rounds or real rounds live, but was able to get caught up thanks to DVR and ESPN360. (Thanks, guys).
First off, a big shout-out to Josephine Kao. Good job again this year. Obviously, it's easy to be disappointed by getting out in Round 5 this year, but I think the Bee did you wrong this year (not to make excuses), (see below for my complaint against Round 5), and 17th is again such a great standing. You were able to make the semifinals in all 4 of one of the toughest stretches in spelling bee history (2006-2009) and was in the top 20 spellers of the last 3 years. doing a little math, top 20 out of 11 million possible spellers is.........the top .00018% of the spellers of your time, each of the last 3 years. Even within the NSB participants, the 290 or so competitors, you were in the top 7% of the contestants. Every year, consistently. Great job, and model competitor: If I ever were to compete in the NSB, I would want to spell like you: professional, with all the roots in mind, as well prepared as you could be.
Plus, getting to the semifinals meant a more strenuous process with a stricter selection process (top 41), so no shame in exiting early. You should be proud of yourself, and it's only the beginning. And no more studying spelling! Yay!
Now, what was the problem with Round 5? It makes me wonder about the purity of the NSB. Essentially, the NSB states that it makes its rounds get progressively harder as you go along, so round 4 should be harder than round 3, and so forth. However, what I saw in Round 5 was THE hardest round from rounds 1-10. Some of the most professional and experienced spellers were getting mowed down to fit a sort of agenda by the bee to get down to a certain number. Of course, there's no official statement by the bee, so this is just speculation, but it makes me think the bee made the words easy in Round4 (when almost everyone spelled correctly) to make the spellers look good), at the expense of a fairer round in Round5, replacing it with a killer round so ESPN telecast could end faster and trim down to the final 12. The problem with such a killer round in one round is, it harkens to luck a lot more than the average round. In an average round, the words aren't so hard as to knock everyone out, it gets some of the pretenders out and keeps the contenders in. In a killer round, it so depends on the individual word and whether a speller has seen it before; there's no room for skill to take a factor. That's why you saw a bunch of 4-timers (Vaibhav, Keiko, and Josephine) all go out while some newbies stayed in: it may be partially due to skill, but partially due to luck in having seen those words before. Urg. I'm a little upset by that. As a spectator, I want to see the BEST spellers advance to the top and duel it out in the ABC finals rounds, but I'm not sure that was the case this year. To be fair, the ones who stayed were pretty good spellers.
Ultimately, I was satisifed with the winner of the bee, Kavya Shivashankar. The tone of my previous posts might have indicated I was against Kavya winning, but no, I appreciate her dedication, and it was really her story coming full circle, finishing 10th, 7th, 4th, and then, finally, 1st, and 10 years after her hero Nupur Lala won it, she takes home the title. What I've learned about the bee is that there's a luck involved based on tough words, random draw, but the sole winner of the bee is NEVER an accident. The winner has always studied very hard, usually accumulated quite a lot of experience, and over the course of the 12 + or so rounds has spelled so many words that it could not be simply based on luck, he or she HAD to know enough words to get there. That's why the prestige of being the National Spelling Bee champion is so sought after and means so much, it means that that year, you were THE best speller in the country, you conquered all others in the national spelling bee and (usually) made no mistakes to get there. I tip my hat to Kavya, she definitely has a bright future ahead of her.
ESPN/ ABC definitely got what it wanted in having their "favorite" finally win...either that or Kennyi Aouad, who got surprisingly far into the finals and was the subject of many camera shots.
Tom Bergeron is extraneous. He adds almost no value to the show, I like Robin Roberts better.
Erin Andrews is really good with interviews, she brings a less scripted tone to the interview, and that's why ESPN uses her, I guess.
I was cheering for Kyle Mou, and he looked REAL good, but a 4th place finish is no joke. He was the Theodore Yuan of this cycle. Nice 3-year run.
The sentences were funny for a while, but towards the end I was just like, "c'mon, let's just get to it." Sometimes Dr. Bailley would just use the sentence without even being prompted, which was a little uncalled for, IMO.
Early preview for 2009: I realized there are no clear favorites for next year. In 2005 -2008, there was at least one returning 5-year speller every year. Didn't happen in 2009, but there WERE four 4-timers. In 2010, unless I'm mistaken, there will only be ONE returning four-timer, neetu chandak, who got to the finals this year, and then the rest will be returnin 3-timers. What happened to the perennials? I'm not sure.......the bee might be at a break in the action, where the old guard is passing down to the young guard......next year might be the best chance for a first-timer to win it in a long time. No Kerry Closes, no samir patels, no kavya shivashankars, no matthew evans, none of those guys who are automatically favorites when they come back.
Next post, I will get back to fantasy baseball. Trust me.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment