Italy, South Korea strike gold at World Fencing Championships

Italy's Mara Navarria, the world's top-ranked women epeeist, claimed her first World Fencing Championships title on the fourth day of the 2018 edition in Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province, on Sunday. South Korean fencer Kim Jung-hwan won gold in the men's sabre event.

Navarria, 33, defeated Romania's Ana Maria Popescu, 34, 13-9 in the finals of the women's individual epee event. Popescu had had a narrow win over the United States' Courtney Hurley, winning by 14 points to 13 in the semi-finals, while Navarria had faced Swiss fencer Laura Staehli, winning with a score of 15-8 to advance to the final.

The veteran Italian fencer, three-time World Cup and two-time Grand Prix gold medal winner, called the championships title a dream of hers. "I am very happy, now I have realized my dream. I worked a lot and I’m not young," said Navarria, adding that she has fulfilled her promise to her coach that she would win.

In the men's individual sabre, Kim Jung-hwan beat American Eli Dershwitz 15-11 in the finals. Dershwitz, the world number three, had defeated South Korea's KIM Jun-ho by a single point, 15-14 in the semi-finals while Kim Jung-hwan had taken on Kamil Ibragimov of Russia, in the other semi-final match, winning by 15 points to 13.

On the Chinese front, all of the eight fencers who had advanced to the round of 64 in the women's epee and men's sabre individual were, however, knocked out in the rounds of 32 and 16.

Sun Yiwen, the world number six for the women's epee and bronze medalist at the 2016 Olympic Games, was upset 8-15 by Swiss Staehli Laura, while sabre fencer Xu Yingming was beaten in a close battle 14-15 by German's Max Hartung.

"It is such a pity that I was defeated. It seems far from my initial goal, which is to be in the top eight." said Xu, who saw her championships come to an end in the round of 32.

The finals of the other individual events and the preliminary rounds of the team events will be held in the coming days.