Window of Opportunity: Gu (KOR) v Szatmari (HUN)

Sorry for the absence!

I’ve left it a few weeks to see if anyone was going to post the videos from the Budapest world cup. Nobody has, so I’m just going to go ahead and do it.

As previously discussed, Gu Bongil absolutely smashed this competition. The closest anyone got to him all day was Szatmari in the round of 8. Gu seemed unfamiliar with his style and took a while to get a bead on him, leading to a classic illustration of his chasing game. In the first half Szatmari took a narrow lead, getting a lot of successful hits in prep and generally being just a tiny fraction faster than Gu was expecting, while Gu struggled to keep pace almost exclusively with his distinctive fast parry-5 riposte off the start line.

In the second half he got the measure of Szatmari’s distance, and there was a whooooole lot of this:

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Fall-short let to fall-short let to parry led to marching attack in a 5-0 run, and Szatmari was obviously frustrated. He got in one razor-fine takeover and a parry of a lazy long attack by Gu, but by then the Korean was only one point away from victory, and Szatmari got tense.

This produced another one of those awkward cat-and-mouse exchanges from Gu which is too long for a single GIF. Here’s your epic hit of the day:

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That’s a perfect encapsulation of the world #1, right there. The long lunge, the waiting game, the spectacular clumsiness which somehow without warning turns from apparent stumbling panic into a precisely timed acceleration forwards. Also the falling over. It’s pretty great.

The full match is available on our YouTube channel here:

I’ve also uploaded the rest of the bouts from the round of 8 through to the final. Some of the match-ups in the 8 were pretty weird, but the semis and final were superb.

L8 Montano v Huebers