Some of the high schools in Poland had classes* that were specialising in preparing students for algorithms competitions. Back when I was in this age, we had additional weekend tutorials focused solely on solving topcoder kind of challenges. A lot of guys that did well went to the Warsaw University afterwards and kept on scoring more contests.

*Structure of educational system might be a bit different there, so by class I mean a profiled group of people stuck together for 3 years of high school.