Five people, five 5th placers... Brightest minds of Turkiye with one mutual dream: representing their country at IOI. Countless hours spent coding, debugging and studying towards their goal. But little did they know, they were cursed. All of them came very close to getting into the team, closest you can get to it actually but the 5th place curse would not let it happen.
What does this curse do? Well every IOI team has 4 participants in it, each of them finishing in the top 4 in their country's team selection. When you finish in 5th place, its a very heartbreaking situation but unless its your last year, its actually not so bad because you have great chances for next year. The thing with this curse is, it selects a person with more years to go and makes them finish 5th in the team selection, and then never let them actually achieve it. The whole timeline of the curse is in erkam's blog.
"One day a brave warrior will defeat it." --erkam
The curse has been active for a decade now but I am very happy to be announcing that it has been lifted, and the Turkish Olympiad community is once again free! I was the 5th placer from the last year's team selection, and I managed to get into the team this year :D. This horrible curse is no longer able to affect us anymore and the heart of the new 5th placers will fill with hope once again.
It has been 3 years since the last update about this curse, so I wanted to give you some little updates and share my experiences with the 5th placers I met so far.
kalimm
He has one of the most interesting stories because not only did he start this curse, he actually did get into the team in 2016. The reason he is one of the people here is because in 2016, Turkiye wasn't able to send a team to IOI. 2016 was his last chance so he was ripped away from his IOI participation, probably a good medal too. My theory is that this was not meant to happen, and the huge abnormally caused the curse to be born, repeating the same pattern every following year. He made the first blog about this situation in Turkiye.
Even tho he was doing olympiad way before my time, I actually met him once and even competed against him. Me and carcinisation attended a team competition organized by METU and qualified for the final round in Ankara back in 2025. There were a lot of teams of 2 there, but the person next to us was sitting all alone... I couldn't recognize him at first, but it was him! The scoreboard was open so we could see who solved what anytime and let me tell you, he was a monster. It was so hard to keep up with him even though he was only 1 person. In the end, we both solved same number of problems. After that day, my respect for him increased even more, and meeting him was a great experience :)
TahsinEnesKuru
He is the only one I have never met but I found an interview of him in the internet and he seems to be doing great. He made a similiar blog to kalimm's about the curse.
AhmetKaan
Now if I say everything there is to say about this man, I would reach the codeforces blog length limit if there is one because his life could be a whole book. There is a full blog about him and his story. He is one of my heros in competitive programming because a lot of people leave cp mostly after their National Olympiad adventure is over but after failing to get in the team 3 times in a row and even getting 5th place once, he continued to be a big part of Turkish Olympiad in Informatics. He still teaches in our summer and winter camps and is one of the biggest reasons that new generations still learns good stuff. I remember him privately teaching me lazy segment tree back when I was new and even that one time made me understand that topic very well. He is still very connected with us and is continuing to be a part of Olympiad. He was also a guest in this years Turkish IOI delegation.
erkam
Here we have the biggest victim of the curse. Typically, the curse makes the victim finish in 5th place once or twice but he had to go through this situation THREE times! (Try finding the user " 555 " in codeforces). He was one of the participants when Turkiye started attending EJOI in 2019. He did amazing on the first day but messed up on his second day. Funnily, he had the highest score without a medal that year, hinting on the 5th places to come. Even though he didn't get a medal that year, he still had 1 more year as a junior. Usually, all of our EJOI participants participate on their last year as junior and we have very very few who manage to participate multiple times in it. Showing that performance on his first year was saying a lot about the potential he had. Next year, he managed to get a high bronze medal. The long, heartbreaking story starts after that and you can find all about it in his blog above. I also want to mention that he got the best results from our country in BalkOI 2022, a silver medal.
I first met him on his last year, he came to our junior class and chatted with us. That year, I also saw him get 5th place again, not knowing all the story behind it. Since then, he has been coming to our camps too, teaching and hanging around with us. He is one of my favorite teachers and its always fun to be around him :)
ayhan23
Last person to be a victim of the curse was him... When I met him, he was already infected with the curse, finishing 5th in the last team selection. He previously had an EJOI bronze medal and was gonna get a honorable mention in BalkOI that year. Unfortunately, curse didn't let him get in the team in 2025. I haven't had that many conversations with him but he was always very nice to me. He is currently studying in KAIST, a university in South Korea :D
The End
There are still a lot of people out there who finish in 5th places, and there always will be. This is the harsh reality and we can not stop this from happening but at least we are free from the curse finally. I wanted to make this blog to share this story, conclude it after all these years and talk about these great people. If you are also in a similar situation, feel free to comment your experiences.
List of 5th placers through years:
2015: kalimm
2017: unknown
2018: TahsinEnesKuru
2019: TahsinEnesKuru
2020: AhmetKaan
2021: erkam
2022: erkam
2023: erkam
2024: ayhan23
2025: PieArmy
2026: dead0ne
