42–41: The Score That Fits No Column in My Ledger

I keep a red notebook. Forty years now. A few columns — date, name, weight, category, medal — and at the far end one empty column headed ‘what was never written’. Last Wednesday night, when the news of Singapore’s women’s épée bronze came through, I opened the notebook and sat quiet for a long while. The scoreline was 42–41, in overtime. In team épée you win by reaching 45 touches. Neither side reached 45. The match stopped at a two-touch margin, and the closing touch was delivered by the team’s anchor, Elle Koh. At sixty-four my habit is fixed: I don’t open with the result, I open with who was watching. But here the result asked the first question — a 45-touch target, and yet the win lands at 42–41. How does that happen? For forty years I have kept the ledger on boxing, wrestling, judo, Muay Thai, wushu and karate. Fencing never earned a column in my notebook. My first instinct was that this is not my beat, let it go to someone else’s desk. Then I thought: the sport that is missing from my book is precisely the reason to sit down and write. A medal arrives and we write about its colour — bronze, silver, gold. The colour is not the question. The question is how deep the medal runs, how wide it spreads, and how much empty space sits underneath it. The water bottle became a microphone once, and the gymnasium learned to listen; I have not broken that habit yet. The Asian Games edition is being held in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, at the Aichi Sky Expo. Fencing’s global governing body is the FIE, and at continental level the Olympic Council of Asia runs the programme. Three weapons: foil, sabre, épée. Of the three, épée is the most patient. The whole body is a target, there is no right-of-way, and double touches are legal — if both fencers land at the same instant, both score. What cannot happen in foil or sabre happens in épée, and that single rule rewrites the entire character of the weapon. Singapore’s four names: Filzah Hidayah, Kiria Tikanah, Esther Tan and Elle Koh. Team épée starts three fencers with one reserve alongside. Singapore entered as top seeds by the bracket, so they did not fence in the round of sixteen — a direct bye. That bye is not luck; team ranking points have to be accumulated over years before a seeding like that arrives. In the quarter-final they met Uzbekistan, fell a long way behind late in the match and came back anyway, Elle Koh delivering the closing touch for 42–41. In the semi-final they met South Korea, the defending champions in the category, and lost 35–45. One rule is worth remembering here: these Asian Games knockout formats do not stage a bronze-medal match — both losing semi-finalists take bronze directly. With that, Singapore’s ledger gains its first ever épée team medal. Add to it Kiria Tikanah’s individual épée silver and a women’s foil bronze — three medals in all, across two weapons, in a single edition. On the distribution side the event is substantial: live coverage and on-demand replay on Mediacorp’s mewatch platform in Singapore, and steady promotion across Mediacorp Sports social channels. You have to understand the épée ruleset first, or these matches look like mysteries. A trailing team comes back not through magic but through regulation. A double touch means both teams advance together; holding a lead is therefore hard, and stretching it harder still. Matches stay close throughout, and the last two bouts turn everything upside down. The wrong claim is that fencing is purely a game of reaction. Épée is a game of arithmetic — how many attacks you commit to, and how many you let go. That quarter-final against Uzbekistan matters for exactly this reason. In épée, if you are behind you have to attack, and attacking in épée means opening the door to counter-attacks and double touches. To come back from a large late deficit means they managed that risk — the product of coaching and experience rather than raw talent. The architecture of team épée is also worth watching. It is a sequence of relay bouts: one fencer finishes a bout and hands the piste to the next, the tally accumulates, and the target is a cumulative 45 touches. The last person in that chain is the anchor, and the anchor closes the match. Elle Koh’s job was therefore two-layered — land one touch, and before that keep the whole squad’s head cool. The stillness required at the point of a blade in overtime cannot be taught, only endured. Here I recall an old boxing lesson: on the way back, the block in the head is bigger than the block in the body. That single cold second in overtime is the same thing. Now my first caution. The 42–41 score does not sit comfortably with a 45-touch target. When neither side reaches the target, a match normally ends on a time limit, or on a priority, sudden-death tie-break. Some reports have simplified the result, and simplification is sometimes the lid on an error. I will say it plainly: I will not cite that number without seeing the official FIE or Asian Games scoresheet. In my notebook it stays in the ‘pending verification’ column, because a man who keeps accounts does not build accounts out of mistakes. Kiria Tikanah’s individual silver is the biggest clue this squad offers. Whether she carried the heaviest relay load is written in no official document; but an individual medal and a team medal arriving in the same weapon means the team is not living on one person’s breath. One of the four scores points all year in individual events, and the rest share the dividend. That blend is what tells you the programme has built mental capital — not a flash of one medal, but a continuity. Had the individual and the team medals been spread across separate weapons, the story would be stronger still; for now it stands on the shoulders of this épée line alone. And here is my ‘what was never written’ column. A squad of four means three fenced and the fourth sat on the bench. Who is that fourth name? Which bout did she enter? Or was she never sent in at all across the whole Games? In fencing a reserve is kept mainly to cover injury or a collapse in form, and nobody writes about that trade-off. I keep a ledger of every silence the coverage leaves behind. If a fighter trains for two weeks and sits in the stands, that is not less of a story than the result. Before this bronze, this same Singapore squad had gone out in the quarter-finals at three consecutive Games. The distance between those three exits and this one medal is short on paper, and a decade of work behind it. I do not like foggy writing at this point — this bronze is a signal that a hole has been plugged, not a signal that dominance has been established. The number is right there in my hand: against South Korea, at the highest level of the competition, the margin is ten touches. And those ten touches are the real headline of that night for me. The bronze is history; the 35–45 against Korea is geography. Korean fencing is a factory — Korea, China, Japan and Hong Kong together have built a hard ceiling over Asian fencing. Getting under that ceiling and breaking through that ceiling are two different stories, and confusing the two is how a report turns false. I am a man who keeps accounts. In 2026, during the Russia World Cup, I sat on the desk in Dhaka and counted: that June the sports pages carried eleven World Cup items and one combat-sports item — the karate nationals, a 200-word agency brief, zero minutes of television. From that night on I have kept a coverage ledger, updated monthly. That habit is why, looking at Singapore’s bronze, my first question is whether this is a result story or a broadcaster’s story. The mention of mewatch and the social channels arrives so neatly arranged that the piece reads as designed to hold an audience. That distinction is not small. A broadcaster’s wrap-up exists to show the medal; a beat report exists to show the empty space behind the medal. The first says three medals arrived. The second asks how much financial insecurity, how much training funding, how much next-cycle selection pressure sits inside those three medals. And here is a familiar paradox. In state-supported systems, a medal loosens funding, expands talent scouting, adds facilities — a mirror of what I have written about Bangladesh’s services teams. Army, Police, Ansars and BGB keep boxing, judo and wushu breathing; but that same dominance quietly suffocates the civilian clubs that would outlive them. Whoever falls outside the selection is named in nobody’s column. In Singapore’s system the question returns in another form: with three medals as the shopfront, which door are we opening, and which door are we leaving shut without saying so? Two columns in my ledger — weight and injury — are both empty here. Fencing has no weigh-in, no weight cut, no repeated impact to the brain. If I stuffed that injury-and-comeback column to fill the space, the piece would turn false. What exists is different — repetitive strain in the wrist, elbow and knee, and one rare but frightening possibility: a broken blade. Masks and FIE-standard equipment keep that risk low; they do not remove it. Fourteen months, twenty fighters, nine empty bouts — I counted the echoes, and I learned that injured athletes do not take long to come back; it is the courage to come back that takes long to assemble. Elle Koh’s closing touch in overtime was that too — an account of courage, an account of craft. Now the other side. Say this bronze becomes the face of Singapore fencing for the next six months. Where does the wrong message travel? Towards this: Singapore fencing is strong, now it is time for gold. That sentence sits badly in my ear. A ten-touch margin against Korea is not a success story; it is a clear boundary. Between winning bronze and becoming champion there is a distance, and that distance is what deserves writing — not the applause. And one more counter-intuitive point nobody makes. Why is the result so clean? Because it is electronic touch detection — no judging decision, no dispute, no accusation of a hand in the wrong place. Sports with clean results do not demand much of a pen; you can write praise without explanation. In my experience a clean result often signals an unfinished story, because the real struggle happens off the piste, in the quiet wait of the fourth name on the bench. So if I am looking forward, I will watch one number — Singapore’s team score against Korea or China in the coming years. If the margin narrows from ten to five, that becomes the real headline, and this bronze will fade. And I will watch one name, a name that is in none of today’s reports: which bout did the fourth squad member enter? At sixty-four I still hear the beat before the crowd does, and today’s beat says the account is not closed yet.