Nobody took me to olympiads, then I won IOI gold

I started programming in 5th grade and got hooked. We used to brag to each other about how many programs we had written, even simple ones like solving an equation, and the count went into the hundreds.

The problem was getting to a computer. There was none at home; at school you could stay for a few hours after lessons. Summer was the worst. Once, during the holidays, I sneaked into the computer room and was quickly thrown out. It is just so interesting to set yourself a task and solve it, and then to compete with others.

Until 11th grade nobody took me to an informatics olympiad, not once. It hurt that nobody saw a programmer in me: all the attention and the laurels went to three older students.

In 11th grade I started the courses at Progmeistars. A few months later I took first place at the district olympiad. I was so happy that I skipped all the way home.

In 12th grade I prepared even harder. Because of the olympiad I was exempt from the school final exams, so instead of going to school I sat at home solving olympiads from previous years. That is when I realised the international olympiads were actually easier than our Latvian ones: the Latvian problems were hard, while the old international ones I was solving left and right.

That year I took 2nd place in Latvia, 3rd in the Baltics, and gold at the International Olympiad in Informatics in Korea: 18th place overall, listed in the results as Andrejs Ivanovs.

IOI 2002 turned out to be unusual: the problems were hard. As I remember, only twenty or thirty people scored even half of the points.

At the olympiad a French contestant sat next to me. He complained that they had spent a whole week preparing instead of swimming and going to the beach. I had been preparing all spring, and it was one of the happiest times of my life.

What I took from it: the result comes from the volume of real practice, and from enjoying it.