229 fencers, 14 pool bouts, 9 direct elimination bouts, 22 victories, 2 losses, 2 days, and 1 very very dear Bronze medal later, Cleveland Fencing Academy and Joseph Guth have finished the Paris Marathon!!!
Your coaches congratulate you! Your friends respect you, and your mom and dad are so very proud of you.
The Paris Marathon is the largest international 14 and under foil event in the world. It is conducted under a very Old World system of repechage, which is a form of second chance to those eliminated if they’re able to reach the table of 64. Reaching the table of 64 though takes at least 15 bouts based on a system of three pools which eliminate about 20% of each pool after each round leaving 105 kids which is then followed by a single DE to get to 64.
After the round of 64 elimination, the 32 fencers who won stay in the winner’s bracket and the 32 fencers who lose move to the losers bracket. Joseph won that bout as well as his round of 32 and round of 16 bouts which put him in the round of 8, where he lost his first bout of the tournament. This put him in the round of 12 (we don’t have that in the United States) where he needed to win to stay in the event, which he did. And then he won the quarterfinal bout, and in the semi-final bout ran into an old foe losing 7-8 on time. (This is a story of its own – a 2 second mistake by the clock referee which was very costly). And we thought we were done at that point with the bronze medal. But that turned out not to be the case because for the first time in Joseph’s fencing life he had fence off for the bronze medal. As far as we understood from every other tournament we’ve been to, fencing graciously awards to bronze medals to the losers of all semi-final bouts. But too much to our surprise they called out Joseph’s name to fence the other semifinal bout again for the bronze medal. And nothing is sweeter than being the bronze medalist when there was a risk of getting nothing after having fenced 24 bouts, but that’s something the other kid will have to worry about for the rest of his life.
Sorry for not mincing words, but I was at wit’s end at that point as Joseph’s strip coach. I couldn’t quite understand if I would feel better for Joseph getting a bronze medal or worse for Joseph for getting no medal at all after having suffered through 16 hours of fencing over 2 days.
Thank you to coach Ahmad who took an extra load of work, Coach Sergey who stayed up through the middle of the night helping us understand what was going on with Joseph’s brackets and tournament format, Grandpa Simon for watching all of Joseph’s siblings, into some very good people from other clubs who helped cheer us on through all of this.