World Leader March Madness Contest Winners

In case you missed it on Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama defeated Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the finals of our World Leader March Madness contest thanks only to a surprise intervention from Dmitry Medvedev during a knife-fight on the edge of an Icelandic volcano.  But this was also a competition for the readers, ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.
555934_110401_fpmarchmadness2.jpg
555934_110401_fpmarchmadness2.jpg

In case you missed it on Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama defeated Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the finals of our World Leader March Madness contest thanks only to a surprise intervention from Dmitry Medvedev during a knife-fight on the edge of an Icelandic volcano. 

In case you missed it on Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama defeated Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the finals of our World Leader March Madness contest thanks only to a surprise intervention from Dmitry Medvedev during a knife-fight on the edge of an Icelandic volcano. 

But this was also a competition for the readers, and we wanted to thank the hundreds of you who submitted your tournament brackets (and our all-star interns Kelsey Suemnicht and Phil Walker for scoring them.) Here are the 10 contest winners (actually 12 due to a 3-way tie for 10th place.) The maximum score was a 55:

FP MARCH MADNESS CHAMPION: William Lim – 49 points

Clarke Foster – 48 points

James Chapman – 48 points

Amro Fagir – 46 points

Francoise Stovall – 46 points

Ann Cooper – 44 points

Francois Spies – 43 points

Billy McGlinn – 43 points

Katherine Maher – 43 points

Calvin Chan – 42 points

Mark Melnyk – 42 points

Matt Batten-Carew – 42 points

Congratulations to all of you on your superb predictive skills and uncanny understanding of the brains of FP editors. We’ll be contacting you shortly to tell you how to get your free subscription.

We’re happy so many people, and even whole offices (Looking at you, National Democratic Institute.) got into the contest and particularly want to thank those who provided detailed explanations for their picks. They were great fun to read. While his score didn’t crack the top ten (Omar al-Bashir, really?), we also wanted to showcase this inspired bit of insanity from Nathan Eckstein:

 

Now, back to the real world.  

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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