> Since 2020, Romania’s performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) has been nothing short of amazing. In 2022, Romania came in fifth overall, fourth in 2023, and twelfth in 2024.

Here's how those three years compare to surrounding years:

  2017 22
  2018 33
  2019 17
  2020 15
  2021 27
  2022  5
  2023  4
  2024 12
  2025 13

I'm not sure much can be read into this. The participants are usually high school students, and the top contestants from a given country usually participate in multiple years, and each country's team had 6 contestants.

It only takes getting a two or three outstanding students for a country to shoot significantly up for a couple years or so, depending on how close in age those students are.

For the 3 years the article mentions, 2022-2024, Romania had 2 people who were there all 3 years, 5 people who were there for 2 of the 3 years, and only 2 people who were only there for 1 year.

The 2023 team had 5 people from 2022. For 2024 half the 2023 team was replaced.

Looking at several years of their teams and individual performances it looks like they regularly have people who do well. A lot of people place in ranked 150+ one year, then shoot way up in the next year or next two, and then drop way down again.

For example they had a guy who 2018-2020 ranked 174, 15, 4. But they didn't in those last two years have anyone else also peaking.

In 2021-2024 they had a guy who went 143, 32, 1, 82.

In 2021-2023 they had a guy who went 319, 23, 46.

In 2017-2025 all the years except 2022-2024 had 2 people in the top 100. 2022 and 2023 had all 6 in the top 100, and 2024 had 3 in the top 100.

Looking at all this 2022-2024 plausibly could be explained as just a matter of timing. They seem to always have some people who are good enough to get a high score at least once. Some do it their first year and then don't participate any more. Some participate multiple times but only hit that high once. A smaller number hit multiple highs.

With just a small change in the timing of when some of these people appear or when they hit their peaks, so that they happen at the same time instead of missing each other by a small number of years, many of those other teams could before 2022 could have been top 10 teams.

Update: here is Romania's rank going backwards from 2025 to 1979:

  2025: 13, 12, 4, 5, 27, 15,
  2019: 17, 33, 22, 20, 13, 11, 22, 10, 8, 16,
  2009: 13, 17, 11, 6, 6, 10, 7, 8, 15, 11,
  1999: 4, 11, 7, 1, 2, 9, 11, 3, 3, 4,
  1989: 2, 2, 1, 6, 1, 3, 5, 11, 20, no IMO this year,
  1979: 2

For the next 10 years they fell off a little. It was during this time (2003 specifically) that they started using a national test to assign people to high schools.

The decade after that fell off a little more. It was at the start of that decade (2010) that they switched to the Evaluarea Națională mentioned in the article.