Seocontest2008 keyword creates controversy

Seocontest2008 started on February 1st, and its target is to get the best SERP on Google for the keyword seocontest2008 by April 1st, 2008 1:00PM UK Time.
Many contestants started the race in the hope of gaining the $1000 prize, and most of all the fame and pride of being the winner of the seocontest2008, along with the reputation and authority that will hopefully bring in to the winner many times $1000 for the good businesses to be earned in the future.
Contestants are allowed to use every optimization technique except cloaking, and hidden text.
One of most popular methods for gaining high SERP are link building and social bookmarking.
No wonder, seocontest2008 participants started to build their inbound links at a fast pace, and at this moment Google shows up 186,000 pages for the keyword seocontest2008. This means an impressive average of 10,000 pages per day, while from the about 100 contestants registered time being many didn't effectively started their SEO activity.
What will be after all the 300 spots will be fulfilled?

Some controversial and negative opinions already have been sounded.
Amanda Lynch already sees seocontest2008 as a bad thing in her blog, scaring us with the danger of the immense spamming supposed to take place with the occasion of the contest.
Amanda also reveals the organizer of the contest is supposed to get an immense number of backlinks to his site for only $1000, which is in fact a way to have purchased links without actually purchasing them.

Is it really so:?

The participants to the Seocontest2008 have to use the above mentioned compulsory link to the organizer's site only on the main page enrolled for the contest.

I suppose here will be about 300 links, or slightly less.

Will there be really all the hundreds of thousands of pages, blog comments, forum posts, articles, blogs, social bookmarks etc. that contain the keyword seocontest2008 all linking to the UKWW site?

I doubt.

Certainly, the buzz created by the contest will be very favorable for UKWW's marketing.

But shall we lynch the seocontes2008 involved people's reputation for a contest, Ms. Amanda Lynch?

Fighting spam, that's okay. But I doubt the pages and links created for a contest full of fun should be considered spam, just because not everybody likes them.