The annual National Geographic Bee got its new champion Wednesday in the form of Akhil Rekulapelli, a 13-year-old lad from Sterling, Virginia.
Rekulapelli took home the crown after nailing the winning question on which country is planning to build a new capital named Oyala in the rain forests east of its current city of Bata. He answered it with no sweat, even stated Equatorial Guinea with full confidence.
"I read about Equatorial Guinea and how they needed a new capital," he said. "I also knew Bata was a major city there," Rekulapelli told KidsPost.
Ironically, the toughest question he encountered was during the preliminaries, when he was asked about the home of the Mapuche people. He initially thought it was Colombia, which was only a first-letter close to the answer Chile. Nevertheless, he was able to answer every question thrown by television journalist Soledad O'Brien, host of this year's competition.
Contestants in the prestigious National Geographic Bee go through a stringent selection process, from school to regional and then finally state level. Rekulapelli, like the other nine finalists, underwent the same painstaking rise in the ladder before reaching the final showdown, which was held at the headquarters of National Geographic in Washington, D.C.
In the end, it was only him and his youngest rival 11-year-old Ameya Mujumdar that remained and Mujumdar proved he was also a tough cookie after he wowed the crowd with his exact answer to the Earth's diameter at the equator in miles, which is 7,926.
Success was much sweeter this time for Rekulapelli, who also joined the contest last year, but only to settle in fourth place. Rekulapelli's victory won him a $50,000 scholarship, spend free vacation at the Galápagos Island with his family and become a lifetime member of the Society. Mujumdar, meanwhile, took home a $25,000 scholarship.
Third-placer Tuvya Bergson-Michelson from Hillsborough, California, and fourth-placer Pranit Nanda from Aurora, Colorado were presented with a $10,000 scholarship and $1,000 cash, respectively.
Rekulapelli, who is now attending as an eighth grade student at the Stone Hill Middle School, shared that he wanted to take up a pre-med or a biology course at either Stanford University or the University of Virginia.
"I probably want to be the head of a department at a hospital, try to graduate at the top of my class, but I think, right now, this is probably the biggest accomplishment I'll ever achieve in probably 20, 30 years," said Akhil in a separate interview with The Guardian. "It'll be a while."
