42–41 and 35–45: The Two Faces of Singapore's First Épée Team Bronze

42–41 and 35–45: The Two Faces of Singapore's First Épée Team Bronze

Shortly after three in the morning, the scoreboard on my laptop settled at 42–41. Before I could work out who had scored, one of the four athletes standing at the corner of the piste raised a hand, and the bench beside her went quiet. It was an overtime touch — the one extra minute kept aside to break a tie. This is how team épée works out its arithmetic: the relay runs to a 45-touch target, and when the two sides crawl into the neighbourhood of 44–44, along comes a one-minute priority overtime, where there is no room left to come back.

I was counting touches in my notebook. The habit is old, very old. Twenty-two days on a cot taught me that waiting is its own kind of fight — and in the waiting, you find out what a person actually does. In the quarter-final against Uzbekistan, Singapore had been a long way behind late. Sitting in front of the screen, I was counting touches not to learn the result but to catch the choice: who changes the attack, who pulls the front foot back, who steps in and takes the risk. The final touch went to the anchor, Elle Koh. It landed in overtime, the score read 42–41, and Singapore's women's épée team reached an Asian Games podium for the first time.

But sitting next to that number in the same report is another one, which no headline carried. In the semi-final, Singapore lost 35–45 to defending champions South Korea. Two faces of the same team in the same week — one 42–41, one 35–45. The whole story hides between those two numbers, and that is what this piece is about.

Context: why a boxing beat writer is writing about épée

A correction first, because the error is circulating inside my own profession. Many people drop fencing into the martial arts basket. That is wrong. Fencing descends from European swordsmanship and duelling traditions; it is a weapon-based Olympic sport, governed by the FIE (Fédération Internationale d'Escrime), and its result is settled by electronically detected touches — not by judges' round-by-round scoring or by knockout and submission. Compare it with boxing, MMA, kickboxing or Muay Thai and you have to leave a great many boxes empty. No weight cuts. No head-trauma exposure. No pay-per-view. No purse ledger.

I am writing it anyway, because this match made clear the least discussed virtue of weapon sport — and that virtue has a deeply personal relationship with South Asia's own weapon traditions.

Épée is one of fencing's three weapons and the most patient of them. Foil and sabre carry a rule called right-of-way, or priority: the touch is awarded to whoever initiated the attack. Épée has no such rule. In épée the whole body is a target, and if both fencers land at the same instant, both are awarded a point — the double touch. That single rule changes the weapon's character. A double touch raises both scores at once, which keeps the gap nearly closed, which stretches the match, which turns it into a contest of who lasts. Scores like 42–41 or 44–44 are almost unthinkable in foil or sabre; in épée they are ordinary.

In the team relay the arithmetic gets harder still. A team carries four fencers, three of whom fence the main series, with one reserve — usually one substitution available. The bouts run in sequence, the score accumulates at the end of each leg, and one fencer closes the relay to a fixed touch count. That sequence is where the tactics live. Some fencers only add to the tally; others bail the team out at the top of a leg. At the end stands the anchor, who must either seal the win or hold the team inside the pressure.

I keep a book on that sequence. Because professional boxing cards and fencing relays share something nobody writes about — the real work happens while nobody is watching. The truth comes out when the hands are being unwrapped in the corner; it also shows on the face of the fourth fencer sitting on the bench outside the relay.

Core: what the 42–41 against Uzbekistan actually says

The quarter-final saw Singapore take a first-round bye — top seeds, straight into the last sixteen. The report says they came back from a big deficit against Uzbekistan and won 42–41 in overtime off the anchor's hand.

Tactically, the method matters more than the result.

A team relay can climb back from a big deficit precisely when its relay sequence has depth and its closing legs have the composure to carry pressure. Say the gap is eight to ten touches at the midpoint. For regular-series fencers, there are two ways to eat into it — raise the tempo of the attack and take the risk, or use the double touch as a weapon and grind the score up slowly. In épée the second route is safer, because a double touch keeps you alive while also giving the opponent a point — but it does not move the opponent's purse arithmetic at all. For the more patient team, that route pays.

Singapore's comeback therefore says two things. One, there is depth in their relay sequence — meaning they can reorder legs or use a reserve to put fresh legs on the piste. Two, the anchor's nerve is sound, because a single touch in overtime swings a ten-touch ledger, and a shaking hand shows up there first.

One data caveat is essential. A match to a 45-touch target ending 42–41 means the score never reached 45. That is possible if a priority tie-break or overtime rule was invoked at a set touch limit, or the report simplified the number. Since the source does not say which, I have entered the score in my book as pending verification. Until it is checked against the official results and FIE records, the figure cannot be used as a hard foundation. This is caution, not scepticism — on this beat I have seen a one-touch ledger get rewritten differently in the history books more than once.

Semi-final 35–45: the true measure of the ceiling

South Korea are the defending champions here, and Asian fencing's top tier is occupied by Korea, China, Japan and Hong Kong — those four rooms. Singapore lost the semi-final by ten touches.

Ten touches does not sound like much, but in a team relay it is enormous. If each leg produces a four- or five-touch difference, the margin stacks up to ten across the match. The meaning is plain: in every sequence Singapore was slightly slower or slightly less accurate than Korea, and that compounded leg by leg.

That is where the honest value of the medal sits. With this bronze, Singapore has entered the medal tier of Asian women's épée, but the elite tier has not moved. Medal-tier entry and tier capture are separated by exactly those ten touches. Anyone reading the report as 'fencing on the rise to power' has skipped the line with the ten on it.

The seeding and the bye need the same two-level reading. Being top seeds means the confederation has recognised Singapore's recent results. But seeding is earned from past performance, not today's bout. The reserved bye saved them one match, but the quarter-final forced them through three full relays, the last of which rolled into overtime. Singapore bled for this medal, and that raises the medal's quality rather than lowering it.

What the quartet means: individual silver, team bronze, one anchor's touch

The report names four fencers — Filzah Hidayah, Kiria Tikanah, Esther Tan and Elle Koh. In the same Games, Kiria Tikanah won individual épée silver, and Singapore took another bronze in women's foil. That makes three fencing medals for Singapore this Games, spread across two weapons.

In ledger terms, that is the real health signal. A single-lane result is fragile — when one athlete's form ends, the flag sags. Three medals across two weapons means a squad, a coaching structure and a selection process are all working at once. Few large Asian nations carry that kind of programme spread at a Games.

Kiria Tikanah's individual silver implies a special role in this relay — the heaviest load was almost certainly hers. An individual silver is the most form-dependent result a fencer can produce, and form is what a relay demands most, because legs cannot be managed without experienced feet.

Elle Koh's overtime touch deserves separate attention. In fencing, an anchor's job is not merely to fence well — an anchor's job is to reverse an entire result with a single decision when there is no way back. In épée that decision is made in one minute, with one movement of the hand. It cannot be taught outright, but it can be built — and it is a transferable asset for the relay sequence over the next four-year cycle.

There is a question about the fourth name that the report does not answer. A quota of four for a team of three means somebody has a waiting role. When that reserve is used, in which leg, and how match-load is distributed — that is the real tactic of team épée, and it is entirely unwritten here. No coaching quote, no club or selection history, no lineage of the coach.

This is where my old complaint returns. I try to open every preview with the lineage paragraph — who taught the coach, which room the technique came from. This report has the athletes' names but not the coach's. On a milestone like an Asian Games bronze, programme structure is the most important theory; without it we get a result, not a method.

Contrarian: what the medal does not say

Now the part that never reaches a headline.

One: this medal signals entry through the door, not the breaking of it. The ten-touch semi-final says so. The components of Asian fencing's top tier have not changed; Korea, China, Japan and Hong Kong sit where they sat. Singapore has claimed the right to climb three steps of a fixed staircase, not the summit. That is a story of progress, not of uprising.

Two: a team bronze, structurally, often does more work than an individual silver. An individual silver rewards one athlete. A team medal rewards a method — selection, reserve management, relay order, the joint preparation of four athletes. In state-funded systems, team medals generally move budgets, scholarships and talent identification, because they validate the investment in a programme rather than a person. Singapore has both in the same year. Which is worth more is not settled in competitive language; it is settled by the colour of the medal. That is the narrowness of medals, and that narrowness showed on the scoreboard.

Three: the report's narrative is a broadcast-promotional narrative. It closes with mewatch live and on-demand streaming details and Mediacorp Sports social channels. There is no sin in that — a national broadcaster is building its own audience. But as readers we should know the story we are reading is arranged with platform reach in mind. We get less technical depth and more national pride. And that is exactly where information is lost in a sport like fencing — which fencer took which leg, where the gap opened, what the coach changed. None of those questions survived.

Four: fencing sits outside the risk vocabulary of combat coverage, and that is its advantage. For two decades I have kept a notebook at ringside — weight fluctuations, head-trauma tallies, the face of a young boxer handed a towel. Fencing has none of that arithmetic. No weight cut, no head strikes, no pay-per-view economy. Athlete health risk is far lower. But that quiet advantage earns no column inches, because everything here is measured by noise online. It is a cultural problem, not a health one.

Five: the story's biggest gap connects to my own region. I write from a country that carries its own weapon-combat lineages — lathi khela, boli khela, Butthan. These are cultural assets with no living. The process that produced this bronze in Singapore — confederation recognition, seeding, programme funding — casts no shadow on this region's weapon heritage, because it is bolted into a state-investment structure. That is where 'where the talent is' and 'where the money is' become separate questions with separate answers.

Takeaway: what to watch next

The first signal will be on the scoreboard. If Singapore can close the margin against Korea, China, Japan or Hong Kong from ten touches to five over the next four years, talk of changing the colour of the medal becomes reasonable. If the margin does not shrink, this bronze stays a pleasant memory rather than a process.

Second, watch whether new names enter the quartet. A team medal resting on the same four people is a generational deficit. A programme only grows when changing feet appear each cycle.

Third, watch the announcements. If the federation receives increased scholarship or talent-identification funding after this medal, the bronze will have done its real work. In fencing, lineage means next cycle's relay order. And I will admit it here: between one touch and a seven-minute gap, that is where our truth should be read — as arithmetic, not pride. Let the blade write the coach's name. Why does a team come back from a big deficit yet lose by ten touches to the elite? Because comebacks come from patience and double-touch arithmetic, while beating the top tier requires the right foot in every single leg. That exactness is what Singapore still lacks. So the question is not the medal count — it is this: is the bronze the start of a programme, or the fence of a generation? The answer will be written in the next three years, not in a studio in London, but by the hand of the fourth name rising out of a Singapore club.