They Think, Therefore They Are Winners : Scholarship: A team from Great Britain defeats Laguna Hills High in an international academic decathlon contest.

The seconds ticked away as Laguna Hills High School senior Jay Kim sat in mute concentration, his brow glistening with sweat from the glare of the television cameras set up in a corner of the Red Lion Hotel.

“What type of harmony demands a resolution and thus moves the music forward?” was the question for the captain of the Laguna Hills High School academic decathlon team, the reigning state champs.

Just as the 10-second buzzer sounded, Jay blurted out, “Contrasting harmony.”

He was, as the master of ceremonies pointed out, wrong.

“I’m sorry,” said emcee Mike Valanti. “It is dissonance. I’m very sorry.”

The error cost the nine-member academic decathlon team a hoped-for victory Saturday in the 2nd International Academic Telecompetition with the King Edward IV Upper School of Great Britain.

The competition, sponsored by British Telecom, was held in conjunction with the Festival of Britain, a monthlong arts celebration and retail promotion in Orange County.

Through satellite dishes that transmitted television signals across the planet, the teams tested their intellectual prowess while staying right in their own countries.

The final score was 260 to 235. If Jay had answered the 30-point question in the category of fine arts correctly, the team would have enjoyed a narrow victory.

The event marked the beginning of increased international competition among young academicians to “help build worldwide bridges,” U.S. Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos said in a taped message.

“Hopefully, this event will serve as an educational springboard to academic decathlons around the world,” Cavazos said in his message broadcast to audiences in the United States and Great Britain.

The Laguna Hills academic decathlon team was chosen to represent the United States because it won the state championship last year and went on to place second in the national competition.

“We wanted the (best) Orange County team because the Festival of Britain is in Costa Mesa,” said county Department of Education Supt. Robert Peterson, who founded the International Decathlon for Academics Inc.

The first competition was held in March 21, 1986, between students from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Foothill High School in Tustin, Peterson said. The Foothill High School team won that contest.

Saturday’s hourlong question-and-answer duel between the two high school teams was a precursor to a competition scheduled in May for students from 14 countries, Peterson said. That competition is tentatively scheduled to be held at UC Irvine.

“I am not at all perturbed,” Peterson said about the outcome. “It was to work out the kinks so that next May we can have a successful competition.”

Aside from a few audio problems, the bugs were kept to a minimum, despite the two audiences being 6,000 miles apart.

A segment touting 15-year-old Laguna Hills High School during the competition’s halftime did not include voice-overs for the British audience, and some answers by British students in response to reporters’ questions in Costa Mesa were cut out or unintelligible.

The most controversial portion of the show occurred when Laguna Hills High School senior George Danenhauer could not complete the sentence, “The velocity of a sky diver after 10 seconds of free fall will be . . . “

George turned the question over to fellow senior Todd Faurot, who quickly answered that the sky diver would be traveling 100 meters per second.

The correct answer, according to the judge, was 98 meters per second, which Todd challenged briefly. Later, he complained that both answers should have been correct, saying that in a science competition last year, he had answered a similar question using 98 meters per second.

That answer was deemed wrong, he said, and judges at that time said that the correct answer was 100 meters per second.

“There seems to be a differing opinion about that,” Todd said, adding that if given the points, the team would have won the competition. In fact, if Kim had correctly answered the last question, the Laguna Hills team would have edged the British team.

“I was pretty upset,” Todd said. “It was a disappointment to me personally.”

Other students expressed disappointment as well, but congratulated the British team on a job well done.

“Their team was just more prepared than we were,” said senior Sian Baker, who emigrated from England six years ago and is planning to become a journalist.