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Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a five-letter historic place name.
Answer: ZAIRE
Correct entries: 133 overall, 51 solo

Long path to success in last week’s meta. I intended for it to look like this:

1) First thing to notice is that there are a lot of references to Australia and China

2) Upon further inspection, there are five of each

3) Upon even further inspection, the grid contains one Australian and one Chinese reference in each of the following categories: city (PERTH, XIAN), animal (EMU, PANDA), athlete (Ashleigh BARTY and YAO MING), food (VEGEMITE, TOFU) and greeting (G’DAY, NI HAO).

4) Upon even further further inspection, all the Australian references are on the acrosses and all the Chinese ones are on the downs, and they’re both in this particular order of city-animal-athlete-food-greeting. So definitely on the right track.

5) Now what? The title says “Easy as A-B-C,” so let’s guess that Australia is our “A” and China our “C,” which means we might be looking for a “B” country. It would need to be a large enough country to have a city, animal, athlete, food, and greeting that solvers probably know, and a scan of the world’s B-countries might lead you to guess Brazil as the most obvious choice.

6) But a scan of the grid reveals no RIO, no PELE, no ACAI berries, etc. Hmmm…

7) Wait! Across the center is RIZ, one letter off from RIO. And in the bottom-left we have PILE, one letter off from PELE. This could be it…what’s Portuguese for “Hello”? Regular crossword visitor OLA, and we have OLE in there as well. And our crosswordy ACAI is concealed at ACAR in the upper-right. And finally, our Brazilian animal is camouflaged at BAA (completing the possibly-helpful symmetry of those five Brazilian references), where the Amazonian BOA conceals himself.

8) Take those five changed letters in grid order and you’ve got REZAI, which isn’t a country. But put them in the original city-animal-athlete-food-greeting order and you’ve got meta answer ZAIRE, an amusing Z-finish to a puzzle that began with A-B-C.

Whew! Traveling is tough work.

Meg says:

Nicely complicated process! All the Brazilian things are common crosswordese. You couldn’t fit a version of capybara in there?

Jared Dashoff suggests an alternate “C”:

Hello, beaver, poutine, Gretzky, and Winnipeg didn’t fit?

Tyler Hinman‘s perfect year has ended:

This literally ruined my night of sleep. The dream dies early yet again.

And finally, with ZAIRE as the answer I knew someone was going to make this pun. Turned out be Maryroy:

Whew, I Congo enjoy the rest of my weekend now

2020 SOLO PRIZE WINNERS:

It’s now time to announce our Solo MGWCC prize winners for 2020! This tenacious crew solved between 48 and 52 of last year’s 52 puzzles with no outside help of any kind. That’s tough to do, but they did it! Congratulations, and your prizes will be there soon.

Note that we’re announcing SOLO winners this week and GROUP winners next week, so keep an eye out for those.

GOLD SOLO:

Congratulations to our 2, count ’em 2, Gold Solo winners for 2020! Both of them solved all 52 of 2020’s with zero outside help of any kind. That’s…extremely impressive.

Liz Goff — Toronto, Ont.

Vraal — Milford, N.J.

They worked hard, and shall soon receive many prizes.

SILVER SOLO:

Also not easy to do: getting 50 or 51 of last year’s metas with zero outside help. But these 15 super-solvers pulled it off:

Maggie Wittlin — New York City, N.Y.

BRONZE SOLO:

Also medal-worthy are the following 16 bronze medalists, who got 48 or 49 of last year’s puzzles with no help from anyone:

Beth Tyrpin — Quincy, Ill.

Congratulations to all of our 2020 Solo Medalists! A tough group to stump, but I’ll keep trying…although today’s Week 1 of 5 probably won’t do the trick…

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is one of the five people nominated for Best Director at the upcoming Academy Awards.