Taken from Yahoo! Sports

Japanese Fencing Phenomenon Completes Spectacular Comeback

By William Miller, AP Sports Writer

Beijing (AP) -  Up 9-4, Italy's Valentina Vezzali appeared to be in firm control of the Women's Foil finals.  When the next point appeared to be a simultaneous contact, a quick review of the replay by the referee gave her a 10-4 lead, a mere five points away from a gold medal.

"I knew I couldn't get careless," Vezzali said later. "I had to stay aggressive and play my match."

She wasn't careless, and she remained aggressive. She continued the same match that had brought her the 10-4 lead, and then the phenom that is Japan's Juri Arisugawa woke up.

Playing off her game and behind by the largest margin she had ever faced in an Olympic match, Arisugawa reached within herself and found the champion that had won the previous six finals. When the replay gave Vezzali the 10-4 lead, she closed her eyes and lowered her head, seemingly resigned to surrendering the gold to Vezzali. Walking back to her end of the strip, she stared blankly at the scoreboard for a few seconds before placing her mask back on.

"I suppose I thought that nothing left to prove, and if that I was going to lose to Valentina, I needed to go down fighting it until the very end."

She shot off the starting line and won the next three points before Vezzali countered with a quick strike to make the score 11-7. Arisugawa followed by winning a tightly contested point, regarded by some as the best fencing point of the 2008 games to creep up to 11-8.

Many thought Vezzali would be discouraged by losing such an exchange, but she held tight to get within a single point of victory. After losing the first opportunity at 14-12, Vezzali said she could sense the match slipping away.

"I think it got into my head, a bit, the whole myth of Juri Arisugawa. Looking in her eyes, you can tell she believed she could still win it."

Arisugawa confirms this. "When I won the point to make it 13-14, I knew that I could finish it."

Two points later, the usually stoic Arisugawa uncharacteristically ripped off her mask, fell to her knees and cried out in triumph, seven times a gold medal winner.

"She found a way to win," Arisugawa's teammate Chieko Sugawara said after the medal ceremony. "That is what always separates a champion from everyone else."

One more competition remains, the Women's Epee, Arisugawa's favorite discipline. Should she win that, she will have completed a feat unlikely to be equaled in fencing again: a full sweep of an athlete's events in three Olympiads.