Vietnamese Swimming in the Big-Meet Cycle: When Speed Begins with the System

Vietnamese Swimming in the Big-Meet Cycle: When Speed Begins with the System

There is a moment I still keep in the worn-edged notebook of mine. It was an afternoon at a 50-metre pool, when a young female swimmer finished the 400-metre individual medley, lifted her head above the water and looked up at the electronic board. The best time of her life appeared, and it was still not enough. Not enough for an official slot, not enough for a ticket to the Olympics. Only seconds short, but in swimming, seconds are never just seconds.

I have followed swimming competitions for more than two decades, from domestic races to continental and world stages. What troubles me most is not any single defeat, but the gap. The gap between one excellent individual and a system capable of producing many such people. The gap between the glow of a medal and the silence of locker rooms where people are rarely asked how they are. Behind the locker-room door, there are stories that have never been told.

The wider picture: a sport measured in thousandths of a second

Swimming is harsh in its own way. There are no goals, no contested points, no collision for a referee to judge. There is only time, and time cannot be argued with. One hundredth of a second is enough to separate a gold medal from a place off the podium. That is why swimming is the sport in which the training system, sports science and team depth are measured most cruelly and most transparently.

Vietnam enters international arenas with a familiar structure. The SEA Games are a psychological home ground. The Asian Games are the measure of continental strength. The Olympics and the World Championships are the limit of aspiration. At the SEA Games we have had explosive editions, where female athletes carried most of the expectation. But stepping out to the Asian Games, the gap becomes obvious. And at the Olympics, every participation slot is already an achievement, let alone clearing the qualifiers.

The structure of the competition decides how we read results. An A-cut and a B-cut are two different doors leading into the same corridor. The A-cut opens the door directly. The B-cut opens it depending on how many slots remain and on how others are performing. Understanding this is how one sees why an athlete can hit a standard and still stay home, and why the best time of one's life can still be a sorrow.

I once wrote about Nguyen Thi Anh Vien as a phenomenon, and I still hold that view. She is one of the rare Vietnamese female swimmers to leave a mark at three consecutive Olympic Games and to gather an impressive collection of SEA Games medals. But what I want to talk about is not the medal table. It is the question behind it: if a system produces only one Anh Vien in a generation, is that the achievement of an individual or a warning from the system?

A technical dissection: where thousandths of a second are born

In swimming, speed is created in the places spectators least often look. They see the arm sweeping the water, but most of the gap is created in three moments: the start, the underwater phase, and the turn at the wall.

The start decides the contest. A good start does not only save a few hundredths of a second; it also shapes the psychology of the whole lane. In backstroke, the underwater start is an art of its own, where the athlete must estimate the trajectory without seeing the water behind. In breaststroke, every start and every turn is bound by the rules, and one kick out of rhythm can turn a good lane into a technical failure.

The underwater phase, especially the dolphin kicks after the start and after each turn, is where the world's leading swimmers create their biggest advantage. The rules limit underwater distance in freestyle, backstroke and butterfly, but within those limits, the best technician travels furthest and fastest. For Vietnamese athletes, this is often a silent weakness. We are strong in endurance and will, but weak in the technical details that can be measured.

The turn at the wall is where time is either stolen or saved. A loose turn loses a few tenths of a second; multiplied by the number of turns in a long race, that loss becomes significant. In the 1500-metre event, an athlete performs dozens of turns. If each loses two tenths of a second, the total loss can reach several seconds, enough to change a placing on the board.

Swim efficiency is the composite measure of all of the above. It is tied to stroke rate and to distance per cycle. An athlete can accelerate by stroking faster, but the more sustainable way is to travel further in each cycle. This is a lesson that leading training centres worldwide have applied for a long time, but in Vietnam it has not yet been fully systematised.

I went to Russia to find answers, and only found more questions. That trip taught me that technique is not anyone's private property; it is the product of a training culture passed down through generations.

Data and standing: A-cut, B-cut and the map of results

When you place an athlete's performance on the world map, you use three coordinates. The first is the world record. The second is the all-time list. The third is the current-season ranking. Each coordinate tells a different story, and the distance to each shows where the athlete stands.

For Vietnamese swimming, the distance to the world record in many events is very large, sometimes reaching dozens of seconds in the long-distance events. The distance to Asia's all-time list is also considerable, but not impossible to close. More notable is the distance in the season rankings: this is where the smallest improvements can be recorded, and where young athletes need to hold their ground to accumulate experience.

Nguyen Huy Hoang is a typical example of the ability to reach continental level. His silver medal in the 1500-metre freestyle at the 2026 Asian Games was a rare milestone for Vietnamese swimming on the continental stage, and his qualification for the Tokyo 2026 Olympics confirmed that the Olympic threshold is not impossible for a swimming nation like Vietnam.

But this is exactly where I have to question myself. If only a few individuals reach that threshold over many years, can their success be repeated? A sustainable sport is measured by the number of athletes who can replace one another, not by a single star. And this is the question Vietnamese swimming has not yet answered.

The competition system and the participation mechanism

Swimming has a clear competition pyramid. At the top is the Olympic Games. Below it are the long-course and short-course World Championships. Then the Swimming World Cup. Then continental events such as the Asian Games. Finally, national and regional events such as the SEA Games. Each tier of the pyramid has its own function: one tier to accumulate, one to assert, and one to conquer.

For Vietnam, the SEA Games often carry the function of regional accumulation and assertion. But there is a trap I have witnessed: results at the SEA Games can create a false sense of satisfaction. A SEA Games champion can still be dozens of seconds away from the continental top group. If we read regional results as if they were continental results, we will lull ourselves to sleep.

The Olympic participation mechanism relies on the A-cut and the B-cut. The A-cut is the threshold sufficient to secure a direct slot, with a limit on the number of athletes per country. The B-cut is the backup threshold, where participation depends on how many unfilled slots remain worldwide. For a swimming nation like Vietnam, reaching the B-cut is already a great effort, and reaching the A-cut is a feat.

Competition density is also a factor rarely mentioned. An athlete who wants to maintain peak form year-round must take part in a dense schedule, and that requires a complete logistics, medical and psychological system. This is where the gap between a developed sport and a developing sport becomes clearest.

The world swimming map and Vietnam's position

World swimming is dominated by a small group of nations. The United States, Australia, China and a few European powers share most of the medals at major events. This dominance rests not only on talent, but on a training system built over decades, with national training centres, world-class coaches and enormous investment.

In the women's events, names such as Katie Ledecky of the United States, Ariarne Titmus and Kaylee McKeown of Australia, or Zhang Yufei of China, represent a standard the rest of the world must work hard to match. In the men's events, athletes such as Adam Peaty of Great Britain or Leon Marchand of France show that even nations with a swimming tradition must constantly innovate to keep their position.

Where does Vietnam stand on this map? We belong to the group of Southeast Asian nations with potential, alongside Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Within the region, we have athletes who can compete for medals. But at continental level, we are still apprentices. And at world level, we are observers.

This does not mean we lack talent. On the contrary, I believe talent is not lacking. What we lack is a continuous talent supply chain, where each generation of athletes is trained to replace the previous one, and where lessons learned are passed on systematically.

Rules, anti-doping and legitimacy

Swimming is one of the sports with the strictest systems of rules and oversight. Every movement has its own regulation, and every regulation can become the boundary between success and failure. In breaststroke, the rules on kick rhythm and arm movement have changed over the years, and each change opens up new tactics.

On anti-doping, swimming is a sport under particular scrutiny by international governing bodies. Debates over positive cases, over unintentional contamination, or over procedural issues, have repeatedly shaken the world of swimming. For a swimming nation like Vietnam, strictly complying with anti-doping rules is not only an obligation; it is also a way to protect the legitimacy of the results achieved.

I believe this is an area we need to talk about more, not less. A sport can only develop sustainably when it is built on a foundation of integrity. Every result recorded must be a verifiable result, and every athlete must feel that the playing field is fair.

Athlete careers and the team system

The career of a swimmer has a particular curve. The peak usually comes in the early twenties, followed by a long period of struggling to maintain form. For female athletes, puberty can bring physical changes that directly affect performance, and managing this period requires a deep understanding of physiology and psychology.

In Vietnam, the training system still relies heavily on the personal experience of coaches, rather than on a standardised sports-science foundation. This does not deny the enormous efforts of the coaching staff, but points to a systemic limit. When an athlete is injured, recovery depends on a small team, and sometimes lacks advanced diagnostic and treatment facilities.

On competition psychology, this is a decisive factor at major events, where the gap between athletes is measured in hundredths of a second. An athlete can swim well in the heats but fail to reproduce that form in the final. This phenomenon, which I call the final-syndrome, has robbed Vietnamese athletes of more than a few opportunities.

The risk profile

When analysing risk in swimming, I usually divide it into five groups. The first is competitive risk, including injury, physical maturation, and the peak window of a career. The second is systemic risk, including dependence on a few individuals and a lack of team depth. The third is the risk of rules and anti-doping. The fourth is psychological and public-opinion risk. The fifth is the risk to the sustainability of investment.

For Vietnamese swimming, the biggest risk I see is not a specific defeat, but dependence on a few stars. When a star retires, a whole generation of expectation can collapse if there is no successor. This is a structural risk, and it must be solved by investing in youth development, not by stopgap measures.

The public narrative and expectations

In recent years, the Vietnamese public has taken an increasing interest in swimming, especially women's swimming. This is an encouraging signal, but it also poses a challenge. Public expectations are often shaped by results at the SEA Games, where we can win many medals. When those expectations are carried to the continental and world stages, the gap between expectation and reality can create disappointment.

Where are the women? I once asked that question at a World Cup and received a lot of silence in return. But in swimming, women are by no means absent. They are right there in the lanes, and sometimes they are the ones carrying the greatest expectations. The issue is not their presence, but how we recognise, invest in, and tell their stories.

The industry ripple effect

Swimming is not only a competitive sport; it is an industry with its own value chain. Upstream are youth development, the coaching market and the talent supply. Midstream are the athletes and the events. Downstream are media, sponsorship, equipment and derivative markets.

When an athlete achieves a result, the ripple effect can be large. It encourages parents to send their children to learn to swim, drives investment in infrastructure, and creates a new generation of fans. In Vietnam, the learn-to-swim movement has made some progress, but it is still not tightly connected to the elite competition system.

Facilities are an important bottleneck. A pool meeting international competition standards requires large investment, not only for construction but also for operation and maintenance. In many localities, pools for training are still lacking, and this directly affects the ability to discover and nurture talent.

A counter-intuitive angle: commercial value and competitive value

There is something I consider a paradox. Vietnamese swimming can achieve considerable commercial results at the SEA Games, where medals bring recognition, prize money and sponsorship contracts. But the true competitive value, the kind measured by the ability to compete at continental and world level, does not rise correspondingly.

This creates a temptation: to focus on what can be won now, instead of investing in what takes time. Athlete load management is sometimes romanticised into a subtle art, when in reality it may simply be making room for commercial events and friendlies. A well load-managed athlete is one who can peak at the most important moment, not one who competes the least.

An athlete cannot change a system, but a system can produce many athletes. This is what I believe most firmly after more than two decades of following the sport. And it is also what Vietnamese swimming needs to remember as it enters the next big-meet cycle.

I went to Russia to find answers, and only found more questions. But there is one thing I learned: strong sports nations are not the ones with the most stars, but the ones that know how to turn one star into a standard for the next generation to follow.

What is changing

When the audience is gone, we truly listen to the athlete. The pandemic taught me that, when the lanes fell silent and the stories from the locker room became the most precious asset. In that silence, I realised that Vietnamese swimming is at a crossroads.

A new generation of athletes is growing up, with more access to sports science and international information than the generation before. New pools are being built. Young coaches are being trained. And the public, especially female spectators, are more interested in swimming than ever.

In Nha Trang that year, I did not just open a channel — I opened a door. That door is still open, and what I most hope for is that more people will walk through it. Vietnamese swimming does not need a miracle; it needs a system. And if we build that system, a gap of a few seconds will no longer be a sentence, but merely a stretch of road.

The voice from the locker room has never stopped ringing. Our task is to listen, to remember, and to turn those voices into action.