Rapid City

I was disappointed by the choice of location for that year’s World Finals. I was no longer a contestant, so attending was mostly an opportunity to travel, watch the contest, and enjoy the events. Naturally, I wanted the Finals somewhere worth visiting; Phuket, Thailand, the previous year had been a fine choice. This year, though… everyone who had heard of Rapid City before, please raise a hand. If you had never visited Mount Rushmore yourself, would you have known it was here?

The university paid for the trip, which immediately put me in a good mood. My only regret was that I was doing research on campus that summer and could otherwise have been a teaching assistant for a large course, earning what seemed like serious money to me at the time. After I spoke with the professor, however, he explained that the course had only one TA and could not accommodate someone disappearing for an entire week. So he turned me down. I had to TA a smaller course instead and earned only half as much. Still, there was nothing to deliberate over. Going to the World Finals was obviously more important.

Our team that year consisted of three students I called the “American Brothers” and the “Hong Kong Reporter.” For their path through the regional contest—and the origins of those nicknames—see the eventual collection of regional stories.

For once, I could join the day trip without a contest occupying my thoughts. The organizers took us to Mount Rushmore, the best-known attraction in the area. I went around with the Hong Kong Reporter, whose reporter’s eye proved worthy of the nickname: he immediately spotted tourist, alone. After a moment’s hesitation, he rushed over and asked for a photo, successfully catching his chance. The Hong Kong Reporter had always been a devoted tourist fan, so this was an enormous win. The moment the picture was taken, tourist appeared to activate a video-game escape skill and vanished at speed, plainly unwilling to be caught for another round of photographs. I did not get one. An enormous loss on my part.

All I can offer here instead is the bare rock of Mount Rushmore. Looking at the photograph of myself from that year, it is hard to believe that, despite being so young, I was already that young.

Afterward, we visited the Crazy Horse Memorial. What can I say? It was certainly a sculpture. The story as I heard it was roughly this: after the four presidents had been carved, a Native American chief objected. “We have our own great heroes,” he supposedly said. “We will carve a monument larger than your Mount Rushmore.” The planned sculpture was 172 meters high and 195 meters wide, more than twice the size of the Leshan Giant Buddha; the horse’s head alone would rise over five meters higher than the presidents’ heads. If completed, it would be the world’s largest man-made sculpture. More than sixty years had passed since work began in 1948. The chief and his seven sons had been moving their mountain one piece at a time, yet only Crazy Horse’s face had been carved. As the story went, the people behind the project did not want U.S. government money and hoped to build their national hero’s monument independently, relying entirely on private donations. The funding was therefore limited.

As for the current state of completion… the photograph speaks for itself. The small sculpture in the foreground, outside the shop, shows the intended result. The mountain in the distance shows the actual progress. Was it even ten percent complete?

When contest day arrived, I had no pressure at all, and the contestants did not seem to feel much either. They understood their own level. A ranked finish at the World Finals would be enough; anything but an unranked Honorable Mention.

They ended up with an Honorable Mention after all. The three of them solved three problems by minute 63 and then spent the remaining four hours working without another accepted solution. ITMO, entirely unsurprisingly, won the championship again.

I had no responsibilities at the venue and did not know anyone there, so I wandered around. Eventually I found a small group from Shanghai Jiao Tong University watching the contest and spent a long time sitting behind them, listening to their problem discussions. I had expected five hours to feel long, but they passed remarkably quickly. Sometimes I would stare at the scoreboard even though nothing had changed, with no idea what I expected to see. Then I would look up and two hours had disappeared.

After the contest, the organizers took everyone to a nighttime “light show” projected against the mountain. The quotation marks are deliberate, because my immediate reaction was: you call this a light show? I could gather a hundred people in the hills with laser pointers and produce something similar. It was painfully meager. It was not only my perspective as someone accustomed to China’s fondness for large, extravagant light displays. Even our American coach seemed unable to take much more. He wore an expression that said more than words could, then left early. From the look of him, one might have thought the show had personally embarrassed the United States.