Thank you. I was just telling my friend about this and she insisted this happens every few years. That didn’t seem likely, and your comment helped us figure out that we’d actually talked about this years ago :)
"He competed in the French Championship and won his second Classique Championship" (2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...
There was even a brief HN comment thread about it 2 years ago.
"Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD."
On the positive side, I think I have figured out a sequence of all my favorite tv series in a loop that should last me for the rest of my life.