Nigel Richards is the 2024 Spanish Scrabble champion. But the New Zealander can’t speak Spanish:
Despite hardly speaking the language, the New Zealander, who has won dozens of Scrabble tournaments in English, was competing in the Spanish-language Scrabble world championship. Some of his competitors, who are fluent, doubted his chances, said Horacio Moavro, treasurer of the International Federation of Scrabble in Spanish.
“He shut our mouths completely,” Moavro told The Washington Post.
Richards won the competition in Granada, losing only one of his 24 games and topping 147 competitors from across the world. Benjamín Olaizola, the runner-up, told Spanish radio network La Cadena SER that Richards’s victory was a “humiliation.”
via The Washington Post [archived link]
But it gets wilder: Richards is a two-time French Scrabble champion… and he doesn’t speak French either. I’d say there are no words but apparently that’s not true.