13/1/2026
I am not going to any international physics olympiad in 2026, and the days since that realization hit me have been very unusual. There's no big yet simple goal ahead for which I know what I've got to do in order to succeed. In some ways, I miss the IPhO grind, I miss being able to sit down, open the handout I was working on, and spend hours every day working through it, becoming better at olympiads and learning new, cool things in the process.
Yet I was living under a lie, I thought that if I mindlessly sat down, studied for hundreds of hours, and prepared with a set of resources that usually was enough I'd achieve what I wanted, but life is not so linear and simple as I once thought. I couldn't have predicted I'd fail in something so simple as properly connecting a multimeter with some wires I had never used, I should've worked on my time management skills, but I just didn't think the exam would be so long and I would pay for being so slow. Maybe I'm just not grateful enough, a few years ago I'd have prayed for times like these, had I ever been religious. In November of 2024, after a pretty disappointing exam, I got 3rd place and gold at the Argentine Physics Olympiad(OAF). For most of the year I had been productive like never before, setting an actually good baseline, because I really wanted to go to IPhO. I knew there was no team, but I foolishly hoped that I could convince the OAF committee to look for private sponsors and create one. They were not convinced, so there I was, stripped of the possibility of being part of the team for a second year in a row due to the team simply not existing. However, I didn't give up, I tried to see if I could participate in the European Physics Olympiad, but that failed. Luckily, a friend in the Physics Olympiad Discord Server (PhODS) said that I probably should reach out to the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) organizers. I hopelessly did that, and to my delight, they were in fact willing to accept my participation as a two member team, student and professor (team leader). Over the next few months, IPhO became the center of my life. I kept working on my prep, looked for sponsors to alleviate the participation costs, and filled all of the forms and got all I'd need to travel abroad (I didn't even have a passport!).
I finished working on my prep material a few weeks before going to Paris and kept doing full exam mocks (5 hours long ones). I had some feeble attempts to prepare for the experimental exam on my own, despite being able to do data analysis I feared that we would have to use slightly complex pieces of equipment I did not have access to and wouldn't know how to use. Gold looked unlikely given my theory scores would probably be paired up with a subpar experimental, so I was surprisingly wise and decided to lower my ambition for the first time ever. I decided that I'd be very happy and satisfied coming back with silver. It was a realistic target given my mock scores, so I was feeling hopeful during the never-ending days leading up to the competition that I'd been dreaming of for years. The flight was not good, being my first one ever, and we were quickly devoid of our phones upon arrival at the hostel. It was not great, and I had to survive the first day sleepless. Things got better after it though, and the rest of the olympiad was genuinely the best experience of my entire life by a big margin. But despite the social aspect of it being way better than expected, I did NOT perform well in the exams.
The night before the experimental one I had struggled to calm down and sleep due to all that was going on, and I remember fearing that I'd underperform yet again and things would go downhill. I was immensely relieved after seeing that the equipment was actually quite simple and I would not be at a disadvantage due to my lack of preparation. However, that feeling quickly faded after the first of three mistakes.
We were given some wires I had never seen before and a multimeter among other things for the first problem. For one of the first subparts of the exam the multimeter had to be connected to the wires so it could measure the current flowing to them. But I couldn't get any current to flow through it, so I, and a handful of other students, assumed that we were just having a skill issue and connecting the wires the wrong way or just doing something fundamentally wrong. Turns out we just had to push the wires a little harder and it would've worked. A good friend of mine did that after being puzzled for a good while, and after a great theory exam got his extremely well deserved gold.
I, on the other hand, panicked. I thought that it was just over, all of the buildup just to fail like that. I could not focus in any way on problem two, and foolishly spent a lot of time sitting there, overwhelmed by the feeling of having wasted my shot at this. With one hour remaining I managed to snap myself out of my foolishness, but it was too late, and only managed to rescue 4 points out of the whole ordeal.
The exam turned out to be harder than I thought during my breakdown, which made me regret my mental breakdown even more. But it was fine, it wasn't completely over. I could still have a good theory exam and compensate for my big mistake. In the meantime, I kept enjoying the experience, trying not to think too hard of what the outcome would be.
I hate long, tedious exams. I never did well while mocking them, and for some reason I ignored that fact during my prep and decided to hope for a neat exam instead. But IPhO 2025 just so happened to have the longest IPhO theory exam in the history of the competition. Nobody managed to finish it on time, the problems were not extremely hard, but they were long. One of the problems, the borderline infamous problem 1, was almost removed from the exam due to its length. But it was not and 400 students suffered thanks to it. I didn't make silly mistakes, but was obsessively checking everything to avoid a repeat of OAF 2024 and thanks to that I managed to get an underwhelming yet decent-ish score.
I walked away from this whole thing with a bronze medal, placing 154th out of 420 students, 3 points separated me from silver. But it was alright, I felt like I had failed, underperformed, but would still likely have another chance the next year, so it wasn't all that bad.
Mixed feelings (fueled by getting quite a lot of attention back at home due to my medal and way too many people thinking I had placed 3rd when they first saw the news) continued for some weird months. I wanted to pause my olympiad prep, after all I had already used up most of the resources I had and I didn't want to use everything left up way too early, for some time I felt sort of a void, meanwhile I worked and suffered on writing problems and organizing the 2025 edition of the Online Physics Olympiad, read a linear algebra book, and pursued other things before OAF 2025.
I was actually feeling quite happy with myself during the week leading up to it, I had solved the first problem of Physics Cup 2026, and had an idea to help others; I wanted to create a community for Argentine physics olympiad students in order to share resources with them so they are not grinding in such a clueless and blind way as I once was doing so, and potentially cause a permanent revival of the Argentine IPhO team.
Then the second mistake came, the first one was due to catastrophism, this one was due to overconfidence. The exam was not good, grading also was dubious, and my performance in the theory exam was even worse than both of those things. I don't know what happened, it certainly didn't feel that bad during the exam since I was able to answer almost every subpart, but it looks like I made a shocking amount of mistakes. The IPhO kid who explained to them the way in which he managed to make it to Paris and win a shiny metal disk despite there being no official team, placed 30th and missed out on a medal. I still wish to unhear some things I overheard at that award ceremony.
It's tough to overstate how devastated I felt, at first I laughed because I couldn't really believe it, then it set in, and I cried. I had never expected to fail at this stage, I took placing inside the top 5 as a given, in fact, I went into the olympiad thinking that anything other than 1st would be disappointing due to being the country's representative at IPhO, and yet I somehow managed to place 30 times lower than what was expected. I just wanted to quit olympiads, but everyone around me insisted that I should not, that I should just hope that no more than 5 out of the 29 students who outscored me were still eligible for IPhO participation, wanted to go, and were able to join a team and cover the expenses of their participation. That idea doesn't feel good, sure, I may think of myself as the most prepared student for a hypothetical team, but that doesn't mean that I should just try to go and take away someone else's spot who performed well at the exam that mattered to get in. I wouldn't even have made team selection had there been one, so it feels very wrong to cling onto this idea.
After OAF, I had to hastily prepare for the Argentine Astronomy Olympiad (OAA) thanks to having registered for it after IPhO because, why not. It was short and nice, I managed to win the whole thing thanks to the exam being very physics-heavy. That had automatically placed me into the official team, which was not going to the international olympiad (IOAA) but to the latin american one. I was let down by that, but I did have a plan on what to do next.
EuPhO was, in fact, a viable option for me. I could register as a guest team, I wouldn't be sneaking in/interfering with the IPhO team if there happened to be one, and I would be taking an exam I have always liked. So I got back to preparing for it, an activity that I juggled with a good number of other responsibilities and things I had to do. But then the third and final mistake struck. It wasn't really about doing something, but about not doing that thing. I looked at the official EuPhO website in December, and to my surprise, it was already too late to register. There is still a slim chance to get in if some teams back down and decide that they are not going, but it's outside of my control and extremely unlikely.
Therefore, it ends. I'll probably carry these three regrets for a long time, but I also feel strangely grateful, I feel like I'm free. I'm tired of hope, of constantly thinking about what could potentially come and having that dictate my mood instead of what is. The physics olympiad preparation I did after IPhO always felt like a waste, I was no longer learning new things. It felt as if I was just doing problems about things I already knew, and very slowly working on my ability to come up with or remember ideas to solve them. I spent months grinding not for the physics, but to increase my chances of getting a medal of a color I liked more than brown. It was not healthy, it was fake productivity, it was foolish, and it was slowly killing my biggest passion.
I want to go back to learning things about physics for the sake of learning (in fact, I've already started doing that and it does feel really good, my passion is coming back), I want to do things I enjoy, and I think I enjoy writing, so this post is just part of my transition away from obsessing over results towards being happy.