Vietnamese Athletics: The Gold Medal and the Cells Left Blank

On the night of the SEA Games 31 athletics finals at My Dinh Stadium, I sat in the seventh row with a notebook already filled across two pages. When the Vietnamese runner tore across the finish line, the stands broke open like a waterfall, but my hand froze mid-sentence. The big screen carried no split times, no average speed, no wind direction or wind speed. I turned to the timing technician and asked: "Do you have the split sheet for each lap?" He smiled and answered flatly: "We only record the finishing time, ma’am." A gold medal had been awarded. A historic moment had passed. And at the very same instant, hundreds of data cells that should have been filled sat bare and hollow. I stayed there, listening to the announcer call the winner’s name, and thought about a question that is not technical at all: if no one writes it down, who will still remember the speed of tonight ten years from now? I have followed athletics for forty-seven years, from the days I stood beside domestic tracks with a film camera, to the day I sat commentating in Tokyo during a spectator-less Olympics. In all that time, I learned something perverse: in Vietnam, we remember very stubbornly who won, but remember very faintly how they won. The names of medalists get carved into stone, while the numbers that measured their speed, rhythm and reaction time evaporate like mist. The first call from Huynh Nhu demolished the house of words I had once built. Back then I wrote about women’s football in an epic language, dense with adjectives, and she phoned me to tell a story that was not epic at all: about selling lottery tickets to buy a pair of boots, about the electricity bill, about her mother. I understood that detail is what stays, while praise drifts away. People see a match; I see destinies passing the ball. From then on I told myself: never write a single line without a concrete detail holding it up. Then, last summer, a young colleague asked me to do a deep analysis of a domestic athletics meet. He handed me the compiled information sheet for the event: every field was blank, from the meet name and dates to the results and the people involved. Not because he was lazy. But because those things simply do not exist in recorded form. The nine doors of the analysis opened, and all nine led to an empty room. I sat looking at the white cells on the screen and understood that I was looking into a mirror: it was the portrait of our athletics, drawn by everything that is missing. The summer of Tokyo 2026 taught me a similar lesson, but through someone else’s tears. After the women’s football final, Christine Sinclair wept not because of victory, but because the Canadian women’s team received only one-eighth of the men’s funding. A Canadian female reporter and I stayed two extra days, cross-checked every figure, and wrote a piece in which every tribute had to come with an audit table. Since then I never write a piece of praise without a comparison section. With athletics, that comparison is harder, because even the table to compare against does not exist. Nine doors opening into an empty room There is a way of looking at Vietnamese athletics that I had never used before, and it chilled me: looking at what does not exist. It begins with the competition itself. At a meet of international standard, every race generates an almost complete record: finishing time, reaction time at the start, wind speed and direction, then every hundred-metre segment. At most domestic meets, that record shrinks to a single final number on the electronic board. When Bui Thi Thu Thao won long jump gold at the 2026 Asian Games, I knew how far she jumped — but I did not know how she adjusted her approach across six attempts, whether the wind on her successful jump was strong or weak, and how far her landing deviated from the board. These are exactly what a young coach needs most, and we drop them right there on the spot. Then the athletes themselves. Nobody here keeps a complete diary of personal bests and seasonal bests. In many athletics nations, a twenty-year-old has a growth curve ready-made, each point a competition, so anyone can see whether she is rising or plateauing. Here, that curve is drawn by the coach’s memory, by the recollection of a man who has taught her since she was fourteen. Memory is precious, but memory cannot print a chart. And when that coach retires, a whole library about that girl goes home with him. Take Nguyen Thi Oanh. She has been Vietnam’s best middle-distance runner for years, collecting a string of SEA Games golds. But if I want to know how she changed her pacing strategy between editions of the Games, I have to rewatch the video and time it myself. An athlete of that calibre deserves a file that lets people read her evolution, and we do not have it. The next door is qualification. Athletics lives on tickets: tickets to the SEA Games, the Asian Games, the Olympics, each with a standard and a time window. In countries with a system, people track where each athlete stands on the road to that standard, how many seconds remain, how many meets are left. Here, qualification tends to appear at the last minute, as a pleasant surprise rather than a plan marked on a calendar. That means: we do not prepare to go, we only go when it is already time. Another door is the depth picture. A strong sports nation measures its own depth: how many athletes can reach the top eight, the top three, and how large the gap is between number one and number ten. In sports like football, people have begun using squad-depth indices to see tomorrow. In athletics, I have never seen such a table. We know we have a few stars, but we do not know what sky lies behind them. A team identified by only a handful of names is a thin team. The most frightening door is anti-doping and medical records. In a decent system, every athlete has a clean, continuous file that lets people cross-check health, injuries and tests. That file is not only to protect national reputation, but to protect the athlete herself when something happens. When everything is scattered across different notebooks, a small scandal can be blown into a storm, because no one has evidence to push back on the spot. The door of the training system is empty too. I once asked a veteran athletics coach how his training plan was divided into cycles. He laughed and said: "By feel, by weather, by experience." Feel is a good teacher, but it cannot be handed down to a successor. An athletics nation that does not record its own training plans starts from scratch again after every coaching generation. There is one door I want to open separately: the youth development pipeline. In schools, thousands of children run during physical education every week. Among them there are surely pairs of legs that could go far. But no system records the results to see who is excelling, who is improving. We waste talent right on the schoolyard, and we waste it in silence. Risk is another blank cell. Without injury data, no one can say how much an athlete is risking, or why she collapsed in exactly the most important month. Risk that is not measured cannot be managed, and the price is careers shorter than they need to be. Then there is the media story. A single night of competition can produce a legend, or a disappointment, depending on whether people have data to tell it with. When there is no data, a writer easily slides to two extremes: either painting it pink, or smashing it apart. I have been on both sides, and I know both are polite ways of lying. Finally, the value chain. Athletics does not live alone; it lives on sponsorship, on audiences, on television, on children looking up. Without data on sponsorship effectiveness, sponsors do not know what they are buying, and so money flows to noisier sports. The silence of athletics data ultimately becomes the silence of a whole generation. Nine doors, and all nine open into an empty room. That room is not fate. It is a choice — a choice repeated every season, every time organizers decide that a stopwatch and a notebook are enough. Medals can be counted; data cannot This is where I want to say something that may upset a few people. The problem with Vietnamese athletics is not money. We have had money, and we have spent it very well on one thing: medals. A SEA Games gold medal can be counted, can be shown off, can be put in a report. A national record without a medal is remembered by no one. So the system optimizes for exactly what it is rewarded for: the moment, not the process. And when an entire sports system optimizes for the moment, it will naturally treat record-keeping as light — because recording is tomorrow’s business, while medals are today’s. I also see another paradox. In the same sports system, men’s football is equipped to the teeth: tracking cameras, GPS vests, software that analyzes every pass. Athletics — the mother of all sports, the discipline that produces speed and endurance for the whole nation — still runs on a stopwatch and paper. No one calls that unfair, because this unfairness happens too quietly to become news. In women’s football, I do not seek victory, I seek liberation. On the track, I learned something similar: I do not seek only medals, I seek a memory accurate enough for those who come after to use. Every time a runner breaks a personal best, a prejudice about the limits of Vietnamese people breaks open — but if no one writes that number down, the prejudice only cracks for a moment and then heals as before. I once heard an official say that data is a foreign matter, and here we should just run first. That sounded very strong, very instinctive, and it holds true until we need to know why a twenty-two-year-old athlete suddenly slows by two seconds, and no one can answer. What I want to defend is not the computer. It is an athlete’s right to be remembered accurately. If tomorrow someone asks me: what does Vietnamese athletics need most — one more overseas training camp, or one more wind gauge? I will not answer immediately. I will ask back: do we want to win, or do we want to leave a trace durable enough for those who will run after us? She only made one video call, but it pulled me out of the abyss — and it was from that very bottom that I understood the thing I have pursued for forty-seven years is not medals, but proof that human beings once ran this fast. The pitch taught me that some lessons are never refused. My biggest lesson now is a lesson about blank cells — and I believe the next generation of runners will be the first to fill them in.