Coach Proposes to Fencer at Tokyo Olympics After After Being Rejected 11 Years Earlier: 'Very Happy'

Photo: TyCSports/ twitter

While Argentinian fencer Maria Belen Perez Maurice may have lost her event at theTokyo Olympics, she didn’t leave empty-handed.

After the 36-year-old Olympian lost her fencing event to Anna Marton of Hungary, her coach and longtime partner, Lucas Guillermo Saucedo, popped the question.

As Perez Maurice gave a televised interview to reporters after her match, Saucedo held up a handwritten sign asking her to marry him.

A video posted toYouTubeshows Perez Maurice turning away from the cameras to look at Saucedo. She then pulls down her face mask and lets out an excited scream after reading his sign. With the cameras rolling, Saucedo gets down on one knee and Perez Maurice nods her head, agreeing to marry him.

“They [the press] told me to turn around, and he had the letter. I forgot everything. I was like, ‘Oh my god,’ " Perez Maurice said after the proposal, according toCNN.

According toUSA Today, the two have been together for 15 years and met through fencing. They began dating when Perez Maurice was 20, and when Saucedo proposed to her the first time in 2010, she told him she was too young. But, she left the door open for him in the future.

“We are very happy. We are very good partners,” Perez Maurice said. “Of course, we have fights, but we enjoy each other’s time.”

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Saucedo admitted the proposal was spur-of-the-moment, and if Perez Maurice hadn’t lost, he might have postponed it a little longer.

“I love her, and when she lost the match she got very sad, so maybe this proposal should change her mentality,” Saucedo told reporters,USA Todayreported. “I wrote on the paper in the moment.”

“If she had won,” he added, “no, I would have waited for the moment.”

To learn more about Team USA, visitTeamUSA.org. Watch the Tokyo Olympics now on NBC.

source: people.com