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It would be far more interesting if a 14-year-old won an international contest whose participants included college students studying CS at an advanced level :)

He *has* done this before. He was the top individual in this year's IPSC, which is open to everyone. He's also had an excellent record recently in TopCoder, which is also open to everyone: he's currently ranked 14th and is by far the youngest in the top 50. Unfortunately all of the major open international contests are restricted to those 18 and older.

The ICFP contest allows any language you want. It's once a year, with 3 days to work on the problem. Typically it's a single optimization problem for which a perfect answer is not feasible in terms of computation, so the best heuristic wins.

The Internet Problem Solving Contest also allows any language, since you only have to submit the output, not the program. It's also once per year. It has multiple problems and you have to solve as many as possible in 5 hours.

From http://ipsc.ksp.sk/:

We have encoutered problems with delivering registration e-mails to the following teams: Incubation, Shandong Province Team in Informatics 1#, asar, Orenburg SU 2, Runtime Error, KP, GuoXiaoPeng, kutaisi1, TDT, Haaak. You have just probably misspelled your e-mail address when entering it in the registration form. If you do not provide us with a valid e-mail address, we will not be able to deliver you responses of the online judge as well as announcements during the contest. Please contact us at ipscreg@ksp.sk.

That seems like a pretty obscure problem to solve. Man, I tell ya! These problems are getting harder and harder every year!

OF course, if it's something as simple as mispelling their names, /. is the best place to start looking!