World Champion...Yet So Far

13. Nov. 2017
2 Min. Lesezeit

Today was the last day of the WRO 2017 event in Costa Rica. Some teams went through their last judging rounds and others were patiently waiting for the ending ceremony to commence. Since we had already done all three of our judging rounds, today was quite calm, though we did look out for some undercover judges who may have wanted to get some last impressions.

The whole event was coming to an end, the last soccer match was played and the judges retreated to evaluate the different presentations they got from the teams and to decide on a winner.

As everyone had found their seats around the big concert stage, the announcement of the winners of the different categories began and as it came to the "Open Junior" category, we were excited to see how the last three days of promoting our project had paid off. And, who'd believe it, we were announced as the first place. This was really exciting and we went onstage to get our trophy and medals, took photos and gave interviews.

The show went on for a bit and we enjoyed being the worlds best. Thailand was announced as the next host country for the WRO and the show was coming to an end. A bit earlier on, the organization withdrew one of their decisions and had to denounce one Korean team as second place, which was really unfortunate and an error like that shouldn't happen, but we didn't think too much of it.

But now, as more than half of the audience had already left, one the organization's people entered the stage and announced that there had also been other mistakes in placing some of the teams and as it turned out, after one and a half hour of having achieved gold, we were downranked one rank to silver, which was really disappointing. If we had been announced second in the first place, we would have gladly accepted it and been very happy about it, but being downranked was really frustrating.

As it turns out, there had been more than five wrong decisions in the placing of the teams which were announced at the very end of the show, almost like a sidenote.

We later talked to a few people who have been involved in the decision-making processes and they gave us some explanations, one varying from the other, which in the end didn't really make sense.

In the end, the first three places, which were the only ones announced, were completely mixed up with us being the only team that stayed in the top three after the "corrections". The first placed had now been taken by the Russians, who weren't even in the top three before and the third place was also mixed up, now taken from the Spanish team, which was downranked to some place the organization didn't communicate.

Seeing the organization handle and communicate all this in such an unprofessional manner, really made us doubt the credibility of the WRO.

Achieving second place is still incredible, but after all this we are not very happy about the outcome.