Bay Area Teen Wins National Spelling Bee: Who Did You Bet On?

Update: Thirteen-Year-old Evan O'Dorney has won the Scripps National Spelling Bee. the word, by the way, was "serrefine", which is a pair fo small foreceps. O'Dorney has made a huge jump from last year, when he placed fourteenth.

CW Nevius, writing for the SF Chronicle (O'Dorney is also from the B-a-y A-r-e-a) wrote an interesting article on the darker side of the spelling bee: offshore betting.

[q
url="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/06/01/MNGVOQ5TTR1.DTL"]Offshore
Internet betting sites, always on the lookout for likely sources of
wagering action, have targeted the bee. If you'd jumped on a site in
the early afternoon, you could have bet on your favorite 14-year-old,
bespectacled word geek.

And what makes the bookies think that would be popular? They ask: What makes you think it wouldn't?

"If it's a competition, and it's on TV, people want to bet on it,''
said Mike Staley, spokesman for Sportsbook.com, a Web site that
handicapped the finalists for the National Spelling Bee.

By mid-afternoon Thursday, the site had established Scottsdale,
Ariz., eighth-grader Jonathan Horton as the odds-on favorite. (He made
the top 15, then stumbled.)

"He's at 5-to-2 to win,'' Staley said. "He's made three previous
trips, and he was sixth place last year. Besides, at 14 years old, he's
a cagey veteran.''

Staley said that with tongue in cheek, but once you start putting down cold, hard cash, it turns lucrative pretty fast.

"The bee does really well,'' said Reed Richards, director of public
relations for BetUS.com. "By the finals, we will have done over 5,000
(bettors) ... with an average bet of $10. It's better than bingo,
because you can see it live instead of just watching the numbers. It
makes me wonder how many parents of the kids are putting something
down.''[/q]

 

Update: The national Spelling Bee is entering the semifinal and final rounds today in Washington, D.C., and the gloves are off. The competitors are not the only ones feeling the heat, however: as kids are exposed to more and more media as they grow up, their exposure to new words increases as well, including words not commonly used in the English language.

 

[q
url="http://kdka.com/topstories/topstories_story_151084542.html"]Matthew
Evans, a 12-year-old from Albuquerque, N.M., who is also appearing for
the fourth time, excitedly compared notes with Tia [Thomas] following the
multiple choice test. Matthew said he got 24 correct.

"My favorite word was actually word No. 25!" Matthew exclaimed.

And what is that word?

"Bewusstseinslage," he said, defining it as state of consciousness and pronounced bay-VOOHST-sines-lahg-eh.[/q]

Part memorization, part public-speaking, part stress-handling, all competition: spelling bees have entered popular consciousness thanks to films such as Spellbound and Akeela and the Bee; now is our chance to see it for real.

UPDATE: C'mon, you couldn't spell "rhapsody", right?

[q
url="http://www.kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=6587310&nav=3w6y"]Our nation's capitol is all a-buzz as the 80th Annual Scripps
Spelling Bee gets underway in Washington, D.C., with a Lubbock
contestant among them.

Priyanka Shome will be an 8th grader at All Saints Episcopal School
this fall, but her summer break is already off to a great start. She
has already passed the written test, and late Wednesday morning, she
spelled "rhapsody" to pass Round Two of the oral competition.[/q]

 

I made it to regional championships in Northern California as a wee lad, but lost because of some sneaky French word. As fate would have it, I would later in life visit France and quite like it...