Santos is not a freak, rather a mental athlete

"These people are not freaks, they are not nerds." -Tony Dottino, founder of the US memory championships

The 11th USA Memory Championship was on TV over the weekend. Contestants competed in superhuman memory feats such as memorizing the order of an entire deck of playing cards, memorizing a long, unpublished poem, and recalling the names of 99 people whose photos had been shown 15 minutes earlier. Riveting television.

After much thinking and remembering, Chester Santos, a 31 year old software engineer from San Francisco, prevailed as the 2008 US memory champion.

This story further affirms my belief that I can be the US champion of something.