Barlow Student Wins World Championship Title in Speech

First the state, now the world. Nicolò Marzaro, a senior at Joel Barlow High School is the 2013 world champion in impromptu speaking and seventh overall speaker after a week of competition at the World Individual Debate and Public Speaking Championship Tournament, hosted this year by the Clifton School in Durban, South Africa.

Less than a week after finishing first among all varsity speakers at the Connecticut Debate Association’s State Finals, Nicolò and his teacher and coach, Randall Smith boarded a plane with the U.S. delegation to test their stuff against more than a hundred qualifying competitors from over a dozen nations.

The tournament offered five events: debate, persuasive speaking, interpretive reading, after-dinner speaking, and impromptu speaking, each with its own rules. After three long days of preliminary competition where each speaker was scored by eight judges in each event, a set of finalists was selected to advance to another round. From that pool, a smaller set of grand finalists were tapped to compete for the championship title held at the former FIFA World Cup venue, Moses Mahbida Stadium.

Arguably the most difficult event of the tournament, impromptu gives a speaker just two minutes to prepare a three to five minute speech, selecting one of three unannounced words or phrases on a piece of paper to be the central theme of their talk.

Leveraging his fluency in the ironies of international politics, Nicolò was the top seed emerging from both the preliminary and final rounds. His talks were rapid-fire satire, somehow combining everything from the ridiculousness of former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi’s penchant for “bunga bunga” parties with Kaddafi, a plausible imitation of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and in a serious turn, expounding on the usefulness of the Hegelian historical triad of thesis, synthesis, and synthesis. This earned him not only high marks for content and delivery, but also the privilege to address all the delegations in a large room overlooking the massive football pitch in the center of Durban.

He managed to overcome his skillful challenger, Hong Kong's Lucien Wang, by riffing on the phrase "speaking out" with a satirical speech lampooning the national politics of most of the delegations, skewering himself, the United States, and the Eurozone for pointless bombast, and mocking Iran for not tolerating dissent. “What do you expect from America?” he asked, “most of us can’t tell the difference between Nelson Mandela, the leader who ended Apartheid and Morgan Freeman, the actor who fought zombies in that movie.”

But after two minutes of comedy, he seamlessly transitioned in both tone and substance to make a serious point, distinguishing the one purpose for which speaking out is not only justified, but a moral imperative. Citing local heroes Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, he implored the members of all delegations to use their powers of persuasion for altruistic purposes. “When we speak out in support of those who cannot speak for themselves, then speaking out is not a waste of time, it is our duty that unites everyone in this room.”

With a blend of uplifting, moral pathos and surreal asides, he won not only many laughs, but also loud applause and affirming ballots from the panel of seven judges, each from a different country. And in the end, Marzaro's performance was strong enough across all events, particularly in debate, to put him in seventh-place overall, the only American in the top ten.

The trophies were unique, named South African figurines. The green one with a chicken on its head that he got for impromptu is called Dlamini, a Zulu given name. The beige one for overall speaking is called Mnumnzane, a Zulu word for 'the boss' or 'big man.'

The tournament included day trips to various local points of interest including a reconstruction of the modest home Gandhi lived in for more than twenty formative years and the home of Gandhi’s friend, African National Congress founder, John Dube. Marzaro and Smith stood in the very rooms where Dube and Gandhi met, laying the groundwork for successful liberation movements for the peoples of both South Africa and India and in the main hall of Ohlange High School, where Nelson Mandela cast his first ballot after being released from prison. 

For more than a week, Marzaro and Smith spent their time with talented students and educators from more than a dozen countries, comparing their experiences and sharing ideas. In addition the Clifton School arranged for all delegations to have a broad range of experiences with a broad sampling of traditional music, dance, singing, wildlife, and cuisine. On the last day at the school they inscribed their thanks to Clifton along with a quote from Joel Barlow’s Columbiad on the wall set aside for the speakers to write messages.