This is a very, very bad idea.
SSDs are permanent flash storage, yes, but that doesn’t mean you can leave them unpowered for extended periods of time.
Without a refresh, electrons can and do leak out of the charge traps that store the ones and zeroes. Depending on the exact NAND used, the data could start going corrupt within a year or so.
HDDs suffer the same problem, though less so. They can go several years, possibly a decade, but you’d still be risking the data on the drive but letting it sit unpowered for an extended time.
For the “cold storage” approach you should really be using something that’s designed to retain data in such conditions, like optical media, or tape drives.
They’d have taken gold by just standing there and explaining their logic to the judges.