Maybe this competition is intended to create encryption standards utilized by the entire world that have backdoors or vulnerabilities specifically engineered into them?
It could be a decent security practice to avoid whatever encryption standards are produced as a result of this?
If you are paranoid about the outcome of this US sponsored competition to come up with encryption standards, then you should be paranoid about Bitcoin's SHA256, Tor or anything else that came out of US related activity.
In any case there's no real reason to worry about any of this, quantum computing as it is today it's just a meme. I would stick to SHA256 and plan for a NIST alternative in the future if necessary.. and non-US stuff doesn't necessarily mean safer anyway. It just has to be peer reviewed by as many independent and widespread people as possible.
Satoshi most likely did the right thing at not using something more exotic, it could have backfired, SHA256 was the most widespread with hardware support and timetested, peer-reviewed by cryptographers.