SPORTS SPEEDCUBING
Darrow Montgomery
Pavan Ravindra
Square Space The greater D.C. area has become a hotbed of speedcubing talent, be they college students or pro football players. By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong Pavan Ravindra’s mother had a rule for him during high school: Don’t stay up too late, but wake up early if you want to. So, on weekdays, Ravindra would get out of bed at 4 a.m., eager to start the day. It didn’t take long for him to find a reason to take full advantage of his mother’s guidelines. At River Hill
High School in Clarksville, Maryland, Ravindra met a few older classmates who could solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 20 seconds. Watching them fly through the puzzle at dizzying speeds made him want to become a speedcuber himself, years after he put down the toy due to lack of interest. He would practice before school and bring two or three cubes with him to classes. Anytime a teacher wasn’t instructing, he’d work on his solves. He’d practice at lunch and on the bus,
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then do it for hours at home after finishing his homework. Ravindra estimates that he practiced solving a Rubik’s Cube for six hours a day on weekdays, and another eight to 10 hours each on Saturdays and Sundays during his freshman, sophomore, and junior years of high school. Ravindra was soon fully entrenched in the mind-bending world of speedcubing, in which competitors attempt to solve a Rubik’s Cube as fast as they can, often within 10 seconds. By 2015, he was one of the fastest speedcubers in
the world. At the finals of the 2015 US Nationals in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Ravindra completed one solve in 5.58 seconds, then the fourthfastest solve ever for a 3x3x3 cube. “I knew that I wanted to get really, really good before I graduated high school,” he says. “So yeah, I just, like, practiced a lot.” Ravindra, 20, was and still is a world-class talent. But he’s not even the highest ranked speedcuber living in the D.C. area. Or in the state of Maryland. Or even from his high school. The D.C. area is home to a tremendous amount of speedcubing talent. And Ravindra gets to witness it regularly as the president of the Rubik’s Cube Club at the University of Maryland, where he’s senior double majoring in biochemistry and computer science. Maryland sophomore Will Callan, 20, is ranked second in the world for average time of solving a 2x2x2 cube (1.23 seconds). Keaton Ellis, 22, a former president of the school’s Rubik’s Cube Club and another River Hill alum, graduated from Maryland in 2018 with a dual degree in math and economics and is pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at the university. The Howard County resident organizes competitions in the D.C. area, and has competed twice at the biennial World Rubik’s Cube Championships. “The D.C. area, Maryland specifically, is really big with speedcubing,” Ravindra says. “I would say, in terms of U.S. states, we’re probably top three. I think definitely top five.” Washington Football Team rookie wide receiver Antonio Gandy-Golden loves seeing people’s reactions when he solves a Rubik’s Cube. He can often finish it in under a minute and recently set a personal record of 39 seconds. Gandy-Golden says he’s always enjoyed puzzles and picked up his first cube in high school. It took him a day to figure out how to solve it—with help from an instructional booklet—and to this day, he brings at least one Rubik’s Cube around with him wherever he goes. A few months ago, Rubik’s tapped him to be a brand ambassador. “I just thought it was so unique and that no one that I knew had ever been able to solve it,” Gandy-Golden says. “That alone kind of allowed me to be more interested in it, because I’m like, ‘I’ll be able to do something that nobody that I know can do.’ And it’s just that competitive nature. I’ve always liked to beat my own times in anything I did, and that was right up my alley. And it was portable.” Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik invented the Rubik’s Cube in 1974, and it became a global phenomenon in the following years. Popular culture has been enamored with people who can solve it ever since, and a common belief equating those who can solve a Rubik’s Cube with intelligence still exists— a notion that many speedcubers will argue is a misconception. YouTube videos of Will Smith solving a Rubik’s Cube have millions of views, and celebrities who can do it are often asked to show off the skill on camera. After the NFL Draft in April this year, ESPN interviewed Gandy-Golden as he solved a cube.
