🇨🇳 Bolun Zhang

The result in Shanghai

Contestants sit two papers on consecutive mornings, three problems each, four and a half hours per paper, with every problem marked out of seven. A maximum is 42 and cannot be exceeded, so all seven contestants who reached it in Shanghai are listed jointly at rank 1.

The seven were Leyan Deng, Che Liu and Bolun Zhang of China, Hyeonjun Lee of South Korea, Alex Chui of the United Kingdom, and Liam Reddy and Alexander Wang of the United States. Zhang's line carries no partial score anywhere on it.

Three from one team

Every country may send six contestants. China sent six to its own olympiad and half of them wrote flawless papers, which is the single most striking number in the 2026 results.

It is consistent with the pattern in the years covered by this file rather than an aberration. Six of the ten maximums at Oslo in 2022 were Chinese; two of five at Chiba in 2023; the sole maximum in the world at Bath in 2024, written by Haojia Shi; and three of seven at Shanghai. No other country appears in those lists more than twice.

A home olympiad

Hosting brings no competitive advantage: problems are chosen by an international jury from proposals submitted by participating countries, and the host's own contestants sit the same papers under the same conditions as everyone else.

What hosting does bring is attention. An olympiad in Shanghai put the competition in front of a domestic audience already unusually invested in it, and a home contestant at the top of the table is the result that audience came for.

Reading the 2026 field

Seven perfect papers out of 666 contestants is roughly one in a hundred. The figure has moved sharply across recent olympiads: ten in 2022, five in 2023, one in 2024, five in 2025 and seven in 2026. It reflects the difficulty of the problems as much as the strength of the year's contestants.

The medal proportions do not move. Olympiad rules limit medals to half the field and award gold, silver and bronze in roughly a one to two to three ratio, so gold reaches about one contestant in twelve however the scores fall. A 42 sits far above that line.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented by the competition's own results database: the host city, the field of 666, China as his country, seven points on each of the six problems, a total of 42, rank 1 and gold.

Not documented: his age or date of birth, which is why this page carries no birth year; his school or province; the Chinese characters for his name; and anything about him beyond the examination. No press coverage naming him was collected for this file.

That silence is deliberate on the competition's side. The olympiad publishes results because they are results, and withholds everything else because most of its contestants are schoolchildren. A page that supplies an age, a school or a family for a contestant the database describes only by six numbers is not reporting; it is filling in blanks, and that is how most of the false biography around olympiad competitors is made.