She leaned her forehead onto the microphone, closed her yes and let out a soft sigh. Sylvie Lamontagne collected herself, then spelled her 22nd word of the evening as she traced each letter in the palm of her left hand.
“O-S-S-I-F-R-A-G-E,” the eighth-grader at Creighton Middle School in Lakewood said evenhandedly.
With that Saturday, Sylvie became the first back-to-back winner of the Colorado State Spelling Bee in decades, an honor only possible with a rule change that now allows the previous year’s champion speller to compete.
“I was pretty sure I knew it,” she said of her long pause at the microphone at the University of Denver’s Sturm Hall. “But I just wanted to be really sure.”
Last year, Sylvie wore the number “1” around her neck. This year she wore lucky “7.”
Sylvie bested 34 finalists in the 22-round competition, the 76th anniversary of the bee, which is put on by The Denver Post Community Foundation. The finalists were whittled from about 280 pupils between fourth and eighth grades across the state.
She’ll head off to the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May, and another shot at winning $30,000.
Last year, Sylvie finished ninth in the national bee, stumped by the word “cerastes.”
Sylvie actually needed to spell two words correctly once second-place finisher Austin McBride, an eighth-grader at Campus Middle School in Greenwood Village, missed “strychnine.”
Before ossifrage, Sylvie correctly spelled “reticle,” which are the crosshair lines inside the lens of a telescope or other sighting instrument. Then came her winning word.
With a trophy, medal and new dictionary, Sylvie also receives an all-expenses paid trip to the national bee.
The competition came with months of practice, according to Sylvie’s father, Jeff Lamontagne, the executive director of the Bluff Lake Nature Center in Denver.
“It’s difficult to overstate in saying how hard she’s worked for this,” the beaming father said. “She felt personally responsible for the rule change and didn’t want to do poorly.”
Sylvie worked on her spelling skills about 27 hours a week in the four months before Saturday’s competition, Lamontagne said of his daughter. She’ll attend Lakewood High School in the fall, he said.
Organizers of the event were persuaded to change a rule that had been in place about 20 years that prevented anyone from becoming a repeat winner. But during the national spelling bee, Lamontagne said there are a number of competitors who return year after year.
“I can see the reasons for it and not,” he said. “But Colorado kids couldn’t compete but the one time at the nationals.”
Students used their best devices to aid in latching onto a tricky spelling. Some visualized the word, others used a finger to trace each letter on the back of the number placard hanging at their waist. Still others stalled for time, asking for word derivations, parts of speech, alternate pronunciations and uses in a sentence.
Longtime word-reader Charley Samson cheerfully repeated anything the kids needed.
In the 10th round, Siddarth Ijju of Challenge School in Denver was stymied by “vapor,” spelling it instead as “vapour.” The disqualification bell dinged, and he quietly walked off stage to applause – the only time anyone claps during the bee except the very end.
Moments later, the judges reversed themselves to allow for the alternative British spelling, and, to applause, Siddarth was allowed back into the competition. He was undone five rounds later by “mellisonant.”
Third-place finisher, Bryn Flanigan, an eighth-grader at Girls Athletic Leadership School in Denver, repeated the same finish as last year, this time tripped up by “normergic.” Co-third-place finisher, Andrew Haapala of Sacred Heart of Jesus in Boulder tipped just after her on “glaucous.”
An ossifrage, by the way, is an Old World vulture that swallowed and digested bones it is said to have smashed by tossing them onto rocks.
