[GOLD] KANO Koki 🇯🇵 - Gergely SIKLOSI 🇭🇺 l FIE Senior Fencing World Championships 2025 - Tbilisi 🇬🇪

After a storied career, at the age of 60, you age out as an international fencing referee, and this is his last world championship. It's only appropriate that they've assigned him to the gold. Yes. Absolutely. Actually, I think they told him yesterday. Already this is different than Tsikloses' previous bout, where he never advanced once. He was always on his side of the piece. He was always in the lead. And here, 10 seconds in, he's behind, and it's a completely different tactical game. Unique circumstances in their semifinals, because... One's fencing a teammate, one's fencing a relative unknown. Yeah. A complete unknown, as Bob Dylan might have said. But not a relative. Okay, nice there from Tsikloses. How about that? Yeah. Nice there from Kano. Beauty by Kano. Gets the parry, gets the riposte. These two have been fencing since 2016 at the Junior World Championships, where Tsikloses won 15-4. And most recently, a year ago, at the Grand Prix in Cali, Kano was the winner, 15-8. 2016 juniors. Was that in Bourges? Yes, it was. Yeah, that was an interesting junior event. His preliminaries were basically... And the daytime sessions were basically in a school gym. Look at this. On a 4-0 run is Kano Koki. Seems to have picked up the pace a little bit. Oh, yeah. Hand speed, foot speed. Right. Popped him on the hand. Tsikloses is really tall. He's very imposing. Okay, that's the first activity. So Tsikloses now has to go back to being active. Boom. So Kano scored first. Then Tsikloses took the lead. And then... We're going to get a passivity call here. How about that? I wasn't thinking about that. Because Kano scored in the first few seconds of the bout. It didn't look like that was ever going to happen here. Because these guys were going toe-to-toe. And all of a sudden, they went a minute with nothing. Oh, Kano picked up the blade and exploded there. Takes the blade and fleshes. And Tsikloses was not ready for that. Caught a little flat-footed. I was just about to say. I think they've got room to go to another... What do you call it? Activity call. And then work their way down to a priority minute. But that's not going to happen. Oh, and there it is. Waiting the entire bout to try to throw one. There were no feints like that. And all of a sudden, here it comes. The Tsikloses toe-touch. A beauty. Bang. Kano gets inside. Tsikloses has a huge reach advantage. But Kano was able to get close. Yes, Tsikloses is bigger, yes. But he doesn't have... What happened there is that Kano made the flesh attack. Tried to suppress Tsikloses. Just a little bit from too far at a distance there. And Tsikloses was able to see that and make the parry. He's so quick, Kano, but that was a counterattack. He read. Yes, with 9.98 seconds remaining on the clock. So now they can very comfortably... Now the score is 9-9. Very comfortably let a second runoff. And we now go to one minute of sudden death overtime to settle this gold medal match. Everything's on... Doubles mean nothing. I mean, at this World Championships, I've seen something I haven't really seen before, at this level anyway. Oh! Oh, he's done it! He's done it. He's gotten his World Championship. Koki Kano, where have you been? What a great bat that was. Absolutely. And it ended quickly. Well, Tsikloses is going to take home a silver medal to go along with his Olympic silver medal. And he's already had a World Championship. I'm sure there'll be another one. But Koki Kano has got his Olympic medal, and now he's got his World Championship. And maybe this will pull him out of his post-Olympic... I think he's officially out of the post-Olympic blues. Last year Olympic champion. Look at that. Oh, wow. Tsikloses saw an opening there. He had the timing, and he missed. His point went over the arm. He had a great action there, and he just missed. Oh. Tsikloses yet so far. Oh. OK. But Koki Kano of Japan, our 2025 Men's Epe World Champion. Once again, great fencing. Wonderful. Both of the semifinals were very peculiar, and then it was just them. And it was a fabulous match. And we got to see World Ranked No. 2 Kano against World Ranked No. 4 sort of like the chalk. People expected to be there in our next upcoming bout. Not quite the same thing.