I can imagine how this could happen, even though, as others have pointed out, there's no concrete evidence presented here. I was somewhat obsessed with program

I can imagine how this could happen, even though, as others have pointed out, there's no concrete evidence presented here. I was somewhat obsessed with programming competitions as a teenager, and the first time I made it to a national-level competition I was shocked to discover that most of the people at that level were more "math people" than "coding people". Most of them had no interest in building real software. (This is not to slight them; they were also way smarter than I was.) One of the reasons I stopped doing competitions is that I realized that, once you have your bag of tricks (especially things like dynamic programming, network flow, and the usual set of algorithms), programming competitions in the style of the IOI have nothing to do with programming. However, I bet winners of contests like the IOCCC or the ICFP programming contest would be strong programmers with good on-the-job performance, though. (Or even winners of voluntary programming "contests" like Ludum Dare.)