On Jan. 3, parliamentary debate team members Ryan Lafferty ’26 and Madeleine Wu ’26 placed first at the World Universities Debating Championship in Panama City, Panama. Lafferty and Wu became the first-ever Dartmouth pair to win the tournament — and the first U.S.-based team to win in seven years.
Two hundred thirty-two teams from around the world participated in the WUDC — including three from Dartmouth, according to parliamentary debate co-president Ann Tran ’25. Usually, around 300 teams participate, according to Ahmed Chaudhry ’27, a member of the team who participated in the 2025 WUDC.
Preparation for the tournament was long in the making, according to Wu. A parliamentary debate team member since her freshman fall, Wu explained that she first started debating in middle school.
“Obviously, this has been something that I’ve been following for a while,” Wu said. “It is a little bit surreal from my perspective to not only be able to speak at Worlds, but to win Worlds this year as a junior.”
The pair found success on the international collegiate debate circuit, having placed fifth in the 2024 WUDC in Vietnam. Now, after having won, Wu said she and Lafferty are still in shock.
“It hasn’t really fully sunk in yet,” Wu said. “It’s just surreal … I don’t think we’ve processed it just yet.”
The pair had to go through many steps to reach the championship. During the tournament, each pair tries to gain as many points as possible in nine preliminary rounds, with the highest-scoring 48 teams advancing to elimination rounds, Tran said. Wu and Lafferty came in second place overall in the preliminaries, according to Tran.
Tran described training for the tournament as “very intensive.” Over winterim, the three Dartmouth pairs competing in the WUDC met over the phone “almost every single day,” Tran said.
Tran described Lafferty’s preparation as “essentially a full-time job” because of the high-level research required, called “matter-filing” — collecting and organizing information about relevant topics. Team member Brian Chiang ’25 added that Lafferty wrote “around 500 pages of notes” to prepare for last year’s tournament. This time, Lafferty prepared 647 pages, Chiang said.
Meanwhile, Wu, who Tran described as “incredible” at rebuttals, focused more on “drill prep” for her training — practicing debate-like scenarios and focusing on refining delivery under pressure. Chiang added that Lafferty and Wu will “pounce” on an argument that is “missing even the smallest link.”
“They’re both very nice people, but within debate, you do not want to go against them,” Chiang said. “They will tear your arguments apart.”
Chiang, who also participated in the WUDC this year, said this year’s preparation for the tournament was “a little bit hard” to organize because three of the team’s members, including Lafferty and Wu, were studying abroad in the U.K. during the fall term. Still, the team made time. Lafferty and Wu continued to practice for the tournament from across the pond, both on their own and over Zoom with the team, according to Chiang.
Wu and Lafferty also competed on the European circuit by attending tournaments at Cambridge University and Oxford University, Wu said.
“That helped us a lot because we were seeing teams that we had never previously practiced against, so that was a really great experience,” she explained. “A lot of the European circuit is actually quite strong.”
According to Wu, the team has gone through “a lot of transformation” since she joined in fall 2022. Wu said when she joined, the team wasn’t “too well known” and until the past few years, the team faced funding difficulties when it came to competing in tournaments.
“Over the last few years, we really petitioned ourselves to the school, to the President’s office, to really expand the program,” Wu said.
Looking forward, Wu said the team hopes to continue its success.
“As long as we’re continuing to put in the work to expand and build community, along with improving our training program, I think the team will be headed to good places,” she said.
Lafferty did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
