I don't think competitive academics is really a thing that has a lot of visibility in mainstream American culture. Raw competition mostly happens in athletics. Much more niche are "cerebral" games like chess. Once you get into competitive academics like Math Olympiad you're very niche.

PS: This article is a submarine for Hackerrank.

Unlike getting a plurality of IITians together. ;)

In the US, ACT/SAT scores and # of acceptance letters/incentives are the closest to undergrad bragging rights/proxy for rank.

There are numerous competitions in varous academic subjects, but no official/harder national ordering/score system.

Next, in US universities, more areas than just test scores are used to build an internal student candidate evaluation packet in the acceptance filtering processes to select people using more than test scores alone.

Finally, the vast majority of US students aren't used to actual hard work... this is the real productivity / aptitude / capability killer.

Haven't things like spelling bees and mathletics been quite big lately? Or is TV giving me a false impression?

Aye-aye, USS Betteridge, surfacing for clickbait now, sir.

This is no indication of the general quality of coders from any country. It only tells you that among coders who participate in ICPC Russians do better. There are other factors at play that might add bias to who participates in these competitions.

Once a friend remarked to me that Pakistani indie bands seem so awesome compared to Indian bands though India has a music industry that is 50x of Pakistan's music industry. After digging up more statistics I learned that India's top music talent works for bollywood instead of having independent bands. It is basically tier-1 artists from Pakistan vs Tier 2 artists from India.

It is possible that the best American coders have greater opportunities and hence they don't participate in ICPC as much.

India features no where in Math Olympiad though American-Indians feature regularly. Why ? Because India's brightest brains are busy studying for JEE and given the cut throat competition driven by scarcity of good engineering education they have no time to spare for IMO.