They couldn’t be rattled. They couldn’t be denied. Gokul Venkatachalam and Vanya Shivashankar had worked too hard and come close too many times not to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
So they shared the title on Thursday, making history in two different ways.
The bee hadn’t ended in a tie for 52 years — until last year. Now it’s happened for an unprecedented two years running. Not only that, but 13 year old
Vanya, of Olathe, Kansas, is the first sibling of a past champion to win.
