In the Reagan Administration, the very first Asian-surnamed contestant, Balu Natarajan, won the National Spelling Bee. Just three years later, Rageshree Ramachandran took the prize. Since then, folks of non-Anglo or non-N. European descent have been increasingly successful at this uniquely American sport, until by the turn of the century, Asian-Americans came to dominate the list of victors. This ethnicity has only lately become common in our country, but their success in the Spelling Bee greatly outstrips their proportion of the population. The complete list of winners going back to 1925 is available here:

http://spellingbee.com/champions-and-their-winning-words

but here is the tally for the last 30 years.

1985 – Balu Natarajan
1986 – Jon Pennington
1987 – Stephanie Petit
1988 – Rageshree Ramachandran
1989 – Scott Isaacs
1990 – Amy Marie Dimak
1991 – Joanne Lagatta
1992 – Amanda Goad
1993 – Geoff Hooper
1994 – Ned G. Andrews
1995 – Justin Tyler Carroll
1996 – Wendy Guey
1997 – Rebecca Sealfon
1998 – Jody-Anne Maxwell
1999 – Nupur Lala
2000 – George Abraham Thampy
2001 – Sean Conley
2002 – Pratyush Buddiga
2003 – Sai R. Gunturi
2004 – David Tidmarsh
2005 – Anurag Kashyap
2006 – Kerry Close
2007 – Evan M. O’Dorney
2008 – Sameer Mishra
2009 – Kavya Shivashankar
2010 – Anamika Veeramani
2011 – Sukanya Roy
2012 – Snigdha Nandipati
2013 – Arvind Mahankali
2014 – Ansun Sujoe & Sriram Hathwar (Tie)
2015 – Gokul Venkatachalam & Vanya Shivashankar (Tie)

As our old friend TB used to say, statistics don’t lie…