Sweet revenge for S’pore women’s sabre team

SINGAPORE — On the piste at the OCBC Arena, the Singapore versus Vietnam women’s sabre team contest would have appeared like any ordinary classification match at the Asian Fencing Championships.

But the encounter was no ordinary one for the Singapore team of Lau Ywen, Ann Lee, Christabel Yong and Sharmaine Cheung. Just three weeks ago, the fencers saw their gold-medal dream at the SEA Games dashed after a 45-36 loss to Vietnam in the semi-finals. The Singaporeans eventually settled for a joint bronze with Indonesia, but they were not about to let their Viet rivals emerge triumphant yet again.

Boasting two members from their Games’ gold-medal-winning team — individual gold medallist Nguyen Thi Le Dung and Bui Thi Thu Ha — world No 27 Vietnam looked set to clinch victory in the classification match for fifth place, leading the tie at 40-36 after eight bouts on the piste.

But teenager Lau Ywen — a bronze medallist in the individual event at the Games — proved to be the heroine of the day for the women’s sabre team, levelling the score at 44-44 to take the match down to the wire. Ignoring the distractions from an increasingly agitated Vietnamese head coach Sergey Koryazhkin, who was calling for a video replay of the action, Lau Ywen kept her focus to secure the final point and claim victory, 45-44, to send the Singapore camp into wild celebration.

The victory was also especially hard-fought for Lee, who competed through pain after tearing the cornea in her right eye during the individual event on Thursday. “I am still in pain, but the team spirit showed by everyone was amazing, so I wanted to compete and play my part too,” she said yesterday.

Their fifth-place finish equals the women’s sabre team’s best performance at the Asian Fencing Championships in 2008. But sabre head coach Andras Decsi was delighted with their overall performance in the tournament, which saw world No 30 Singapore pulling off a series of upsets against their higher-ranked opponents. They first defeated world No 26 Australia 45-37 in the round of 16, before a 45-21 loss to eventual champions South Korea (6) in the quarter-finals. A victory against Kazakhstan (18) in the classification round saw the Singaporeans go up against arch-rivals Vietnam (27), with the Singapore team notching the hard-fought win to become the fifth-best team in Asia.

“A fifth-place finish for a young team like ours is wonderful,” said Decsi, a 10-time Hungarian fencing champion who joined the team in 2012. “In the individual sabre event, none of our girls finished in the top 16, so that didn’t work out, and it motivated them to do better in the team event. It was team work and belief in themselves that saw them pull off this performance.

“Kazakhstan is an especially strong team in Asia. They were medallists several times in this tournament, but we managed to give them a good fight. Beating Vietnam for the first time ever was also a pleasant surprise.”

At the SEA Games earlier this month, Singapore’s fencers won three gold, three silver and seven bronze medals to finish second in the medal table, behind Vietnam (8-2-1).

Fencing Singapore president Juliana Seow believes the women’s sabre team can go on to achieve more success, adding: “The team now is young and dynamic, and we are rebuilding it from the squad that took a credible fifth place in the Asian Fencing Championships in 2008 and a fifth place at the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games.

“Beating Vietnam was really a milestone for us because they are powerhouses in South-east Asia, and we have shown that, perhaps, we could beat them one day at the SEA Games too.”

The Singapore men’s epee team of Samson Lee, Lim Wei Wen, Zachary Chen and Justin Lim finished 12th yesterday after losing the classification match 45-31 against Iran.