Although this guy is young, he's been at it several times. He is likely one of the most experienced among contestants.

I think it is a good example of 'practice makes perfect' and '10,000-hour rule' for world-class expertise building. (If you count all the hours with math training as well--though I don't know how much time he spent on math & com sci together.)

Looking at the country list of gold medalists in the bottom-right box, there seems to be high correlation between the nurturing and availability of very top talents and the rate of economic development of a nation.

This is a competition for school students, so the fact that he's 14 isn't very surprising.

He still has four more years of high school and he's already won an absolute first place at IOI. I don't get what's not very surprising.

From what I hear he has 3 more years. It's damn impressive when you consider who he had to beat and the problems they were given. He also came into this year's IOI with two golds and one silver from previous years, so he has a lot of experience. Another major feat is that he recently became the youngest TopCoder target (top 20 or so in an open ranking system).

My guess is he'll be moving on from high school early.

No doubt. Belarussians are very serious about informatics olympiad these days.

Their "Informatics faciltative of the Young Firefighter Club of Mazyr" team is known to beat moscow and saint-petersburg teams in north-east european informatics competition, coming third. And Mazyr a tiny city in the middle of nowhere, if you're curious.

More on this topic (in russian): http://offline.computerra.ru/2008/730/354607/

Yeah, another interesting point about Mazyr: it's situated on Pripyat river, not far from Chernobyl.