Olympiad gold and silver for brainy Lambourn teenager

Anthony Bracey succeeds in the International Linguistics Olympiad

A CLEVER Lambourn teenager has helped the UK to scoop gold at an international science Olympiad.

Seventeen-year-old Anthony Bracey also won a personal silver medal after beating hundreds of hopefuls to pit his wits against the brightest pupils from 28 countries in the final in Bulgaria.

He rattled off answers to mindbending questions on logic and semantics plus mathematical, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics.

The International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) is one of 12 international science Olympiads for secondary school pupils, and has been held annually since 2003.

Each year, teams of young linguists from around the world gather and test their minds against the world’s toughest puzzles in language and linguistics.

The competition consisted of a six-hour individual contest paper and a four-hour team problem, solving questions in obscure languages, which this year focused on Kabardian, Wambaya, Somali Masafo, Nahuatl, and Arammba, as well as on an algorithm for phonetic classification of names.

Competitors had to deduce the mechanisms and grammar using logic and reasoning from the limited information given in the problems.

Anthony was one of eight British contestants, split into two teams, but there were representatives from 28 other countries in 44 teams.

Anthony's team, ‘UK West’, won the team contest, the first ever team podium for the UK.

This year’s competition was the UK’s most successful of the seven it has competed in so far, with Britain achieving two golds, a silver medal (Anthony’s), a bronze medal and three honourable mentions.

The teams travelled to the American University in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, for the 2015 IOL.

But it wasn’t all work – Anthony got to enjoy a trip to the picturesque Rila Monastery, a traditional Bulgarian folk dancing workshop, and two IOL parties.

Anthony lives in Lambourn and attends Abingdon School in Oxfordshire. He is currently away studying Greek at summer school and his proud father Peter said: “His ambition is to go to Oxford University to study Classics.”