Thursday night was a big sports night, with Game 1 of the NBA Finals tipping off in San Francisco between the Celtics and Warriors serving as the headliner, but for the academically inclined, there was the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
It’s fairly incredible how the National Spelling Bee has become a television event, but it truly is incredible to watch kids nail the spelling to word after word that most of us have never even heard of. This year’s event featured a new wrinkle, as Harini Logan and Vikram Raju found themselves locked in a word for word battle that showed no signs of slowing down, the Bee went to a sudden death, rapid-fire spell-off.
Bee history in the making. A Spell-off will declare the Champion. #Speller76 Vikram Raju and #Speller231 Harini Logan will each have 90-seconds to spell as many words as they can. They’ll receive the same words. Whoever correctly spells the most words will win. #spellingbee pic.twitter.com/186UZ2lIYK
— Scripps National Spelling Bee (@ScrippsBee) June 3, 2022
What does a spell-off look like? Well, how about some of the most intense and insane 90 seconds of television you’ll watch this year because holy crap look at Logan rattle off word after word on her way to a victory.
THIS IS INTENSE pic.twitter.com/3UKFCkOrdZ
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) June 3, 2022
Now this is my kind of spelling bee. When everyone’s asking for definitions and origins and grinding over every single word, it can start to drag a bit, but if you had them do this and see how many they could spell consecutively before getting one wrong in rapid-fire fashion and the longest streak won, I would be all in. Kudos to Logan, who crushed this, and also to the Spelling Bee for giving us the gift of speed spelling this year.