Should the student of the chemistry Department to train for the Olympics on coding?

Hello. I am a student of 1 course of the chemistry Department, became interested in programming before that only knew html and Pascalabcnet. If I have a chance if I will persistently prepare to get on a programming contest in order to win, or am I better to forget about it, because mostly there are people who at school program and already have won the Olympics. I'm ready to start hard to learn C++ to become a great coder. What can you recommend?