Cheating was an utter disgrace in athletic competitions in Mazhou. Athletes involved in match-fixing were banned for life. You wanna keep competing? Sure, go ahead—on other continents. Mazhou no longer welcomes you. In some cases, athletes were even barred from entering Mazhou altogether.
Quite a few pundits gave their two cents on the gold-medal match, but no one could say definitely who the likely winner was. The way the match played out bore out the conflicting predictions.
The gold-medal match ended up taking three days, an average of more than five hours per day. The total length of the match was about 16 hours, which set the record for the longest championship match at the Spartacus Cup.