Shortly after accepting her trophy, Anamika shouted, “Go Cavs!” — Which is funny because Cleveland’s last major sports championship was in 1964, but now they can boast the national speller!

According to the Associated Press, the eighth-grader attends Incarnate Word Academy and plays golf, likes to dance and wants to go to Harvard to become a cardiovascular surgeon.

“It was too surreal,” she said. “It was an amazing experience.” Last year Anamika tied for fifth in the spelling bee. She is the eighth Indian-American winner in the last 12 years.

There was a bit of controversy in this year’s spelling bee. The semi-finals began Friday afternoon (June 4) with 19 contestants left, but 9 were eliminated so quickly that they began to worry they wouldn’t have enough spellers for the primetime braodcast. So they declared all 10 spellers left onstage finalists — even though six of them hadn’t had to spell a word in the semi-finals yet.

Meanwhile, NBC star Shaquille O’Neal was in the house. He posed for pictures with the 10 finalists and then challenged last year’s winner, 14-year-old Kavya Shivashankar, to a spell-off on his “Shaq Vs.” reality show that premieres last this year.

Congrats to Anamika on her 2010 spelling championship!