Another IMO has come and gone, leaving us right where we started. Across 31 years of participation, Sri Lanka has cleared a 50% relative team score1 exactly once, while the average team rel. across the last six years is just 32.8%.
One might ask why a nation with such a ‘proud intellectual tradition’ performs so poorly at the IMO—but then again, math is hard, world-class training costs money, and it is far easier to pretend the gap is too wide to be bridge. However, the truth is that Sri Lanka is performing far below (what I personally believe is) their natural potential.
Anyway, here are some quick thoughts in my head.
Going around in cycles
If one looks at the worm graph, the team performance trends upwards in cycles of three years — enough time for a handful of contestants to improve enough to supersede the vast majority of their peers forming what we call a ‘generation’. This batch of contestants will routinely make the team and naturally their performance will improve over time, but once they retire the entire country’s performance resets.
Sure, certain generations might do better than others but the absence of overall improvement over time is disturbing. The main issue is that there is little to no cross-generational flow of knowledge.
Progress in mathematics is accumulative, and the IMO is no different. Imagine if every working mathematician throughout history had to start from scratch — it could hardly be supposed that humanity would move further than the contents of a few volumes of the ‘Elements’. Euler or Gauss might have been able to approximate 
In short, it is absolutely necessary that past contestants give back to future ones. And I don’t mean teaching a couple random lectures the week before the IMO, but consistent supportive efforts, even if that means dropping guidance through email or messaging. Just communication. Intuition is contagious, you just need to allow enough surface area for the diffusion.
I believe that what sets apart strong countries at the IMO is not merely that their training programs are stronger2, but that they foster a much stronger relation between the trainer and the trainee, and just as importantly among the students themselves.
Instant Gratification
People say that math contests are not for everyone and one thing they mean by that (especially in the context of proof-based contests like the IMO) is that it is difficult to stop yourself expecting quick progress. Most of the students who get into math contests are here for a reason — they are good at math. Going from that mentality to accepting that it is totally normal to be unable to make a single piece of progress in a whopping four and a half hours (maybe more if you’re trying the problems at home) is hard.
For this reason, students might simply contend themselves with less rigorous contests with easier problems. Despite this being a problem for all prospective contestants around the world, it is especially prominent in Sri Lanka due to the way the system is structured. When the highest level of competition endorsed by the Ministry of Education is the ‘International Mathematics Competition (IMC)’, it is only natural that the students gravitate towards these options.
As a result, a vast majority of students never even enter proof-based contests and the ones that do spend a considerable fraction of their time preparing for the less intense and higher reward counterparts simultaneously. And in reality, the skills these contests reward are totally different. In the words of Tanya Khovanova it’s like ‘you got to the national swimming championship because you are a great runner, but you do not know how to swim.’3
Reach
The ‘Sri Lankan Mathematics Competition (SLMC)’ is supposed to be the entry point to the entire process of selecting the IMO Team. Today most schools have (or pretend to have) no idea what the SLMC is. For reference, in 2019 (the last year in which the test was administered onsite) over 4400 students (about 0.2% of all middle and highschoolers) took the SLMC. In 2026, the SLMC (which is fully online) doesn’t even contribute to team selection any more, and a few hundred students took its newer Junior/Intermediate counterparts.
The below excerpt from this article encapsulates this nicely (albeit in the context of the United States)
That’s what’s missing in what I see around me — the idea that “you will take the AMC” being ordinary school business at any more than a handful of places […]. There are many schools where the AMC is only offered because some long-veteran teacher has always done it and insists on it. Three years after that teacher retires, not only will the school no longer participate, but no one will remember that the school ever participated. Perhaps there’s enough life in a non-school model — but I have trouble seeing how that can be large enough or inclusive enough.
That’s the key word — ‘a school model’. It is absolutely essential to establish an official School Center framework. It provides credibility to the exam, because now it’s held physically under standard examination procedure and also extends its reach, because it’s a thousand times less hustle to just sign up for and sit an exam given at your highschool (or one a few minutes drive away).
There are all sorts of other angles to this — the highly competitive GCE Advanced Level environment, (largely) unsupportive highschool teachers and rising sea levels threatening to engulf the entire country; but the above factors are the most influential and possibly the most direct to address.
Now, not all is grey and there is still a sliver of hope, but we need to make a move fast.
- This is the percentage of teams which have a lower total. I personally do not think that medal tally is a great metric for how well a country performs on the IMO ↩︎
- Indeed some of the top countries are now choosing to have fewer and fewer sessions on actual Olympiad mathematics at their national training camps ↩︎
- Actually, the original post is in the context of how short answer contests do not make for great selection tests leading up to the IMO team, but you get the idea ↩︎
Angular Momentum 