A 14-year-old Superior girl advanced Wednesday to the semifinals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee after cruising through the event’s first four rounds.
Competing at the annual bee in Washington, D.C., for the fourth straight year, Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan passed through the morning’s written test and first oral round before successfully spelling two more words – tyrannical and salinelle – in rounds three and four.
Gopalakrishnan, representing the Boulder Daily Camera, attends Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette.
A total of 286 spellers – the most in the national bee’s 80-year history – competed in the first round.
Fifty-nine remain in contention for today’s semifinals.
Jake Smith, a seventh-grader from Highlands Ranch, completed the first three rounds without trouble. But the Rocky Mountain News-sponsored speller slipped up in the fourth round on piroplasmosis, which he spelled pyrrhiplasmosis.
