I come from India, a country that does really well in the IPhO and the IChO. Most finalists coming from here treat these olympiads as training for entrance exam

I come from India, a country that does really well in the IPhO and the IChO. Most finalists coming from here treat these olympiads as training for entrance examinations. It is no surprise that Indians do not show this stellar a performance in the IMO: the math sections of entrance examinations have little in common with IMO problems (exclusively multiple-choice, heavy on calculus; no Euclidean geometry and number theory). The IOI situation is quite embarrassing. I've been invited to the national training camp. Most of my fellow competitors don't know jack about algorithms. They aren't even aware of some basic STL functions. Some wrote an O(n^2) sorting algorithm in the qualifying rounds, others memorized a quicksort implementation. But they seem to be good problem solvers, or perhaps a little mathematically-inclined; one of the problems for qualifying involved coming up with a recurrence in two variables and then optimizing the program with DP. Nevertheless, people should expect a lot more from a large country recognized as an "IT hub".