Although there were 11 Indian American kids among the 59 who qualified for the semi-finals of the 80th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee after a multiple-choice written round and three oral spelling rounds, they continued to fall by the wayside as the rounds progressed.
They failed to be among the top three, with Prateek Kohli, 13, an eighth grader from Hicksville Middle School in Hicksville, New York turning in the best performance by hanging in there till the 8th round until he was felled by the world 'oberek.'
Kohli misspelled it as 'oberok,' and with that went any chances of an Indian American kid winning the top prize, in a competition Indian Americans have dominated in recent years. The top four places had gone to Indian Americans in
2005 when Anurag Kashyap won the championship and Aliya Deri, Samir Sudhir Patel, and Rajiv Tarigopula placing second, third and fourth.
Patel, a perennial crowd favorite for the past four years, who was tippped by many veterans of the Bee to take the title this year, in his fifth and final appearance, met his waterloo in the fifth round when he misspelled the world 'clevis.'
Going into the seventh round, which was televised live on prime time by ABC News television network, there were three Indian American survivors -- Kohli, Kavya Shivashankar and Nithya Vijayakumar.
But Shivashankar and Vijayakumar were felled by 'cilice' and 'pelorus,' misspelling them as 'cilis' and 'paloris.'
Kohli however got the world 'rigaree' correct and proceeded to the eighth round and was on the mark with 'randkluft' but in the ninth round, misspelled 'oberek' as 'oberok,' and with it went the last chance for an Indian American kid to capture the crown this year, which was ultimately won by Evan O'Dorney of Danville, California.