Vietnamese Athletics and the Unnamed Empty Column

I opened my laptop at eleven at night and built a spreadsheet with twelve columns: mark, wind, track altitude, shoe model, 200-metre split, 400-metre split, recovery window between rounds, peaking cycle, age, number of competitions in the season, direct rivals, notes. Four hours later, all twelve columns were still blank.

The subject I wanted to dissect was a Vietnamese track and field athlete who had just won a medal at a regional meet. The newspapers carried her name, her mark, a photograph of her celebrating. No wind reading. No splits. No training-load log. No personal-best curve to show where she stood in her career.

A coach told me in a stadium corridor: “We do record those things, but we record them for ourselves.” I heard that line in the locker-room corridor. Now I am retelling it with data — and with the very gap that data leaves behind.

Vietnamese athletics has a paradox that is obvious to anyone inside the profession: we measure with great care the easiest thing to measure, and we barely measure the thing that decides everything.

The easy thing is medals. A SEA Games, a national championship, a youth meet — all of them end with a medal table. That table is printed, shared, read out in meetings. But a medal table answers only one question: who finished first.

It does not answer four more important ones. How much faster is that athlete than herself a year ago? Under what conditions did she produce that mark — how much tailwind in metres per second, what kind of track, carbon-plated shoes or not? Is she peaking or declining? And if regional rivals are improving faster, how wide is the real gap?

There are no answers, not because of state secrets, but because no one is responsible for publishing. In several countries in the region, domestic competition data is posted round by round, with a wind gauge signed by an official and a start list carrying personal bests. In Vietnam, to find out what an athlete ran in the heats, I have to ask a contact to photograph the results sheet taped to a wall.

I went back through my notes from 2026. In eight years covering athletics, the number of times I received a complete split sheet from a domestic organiser can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

At SEA Games 31 in Hanoi in May 2026, Nguyen Thi Oanh won the 1500 metres, the 3000 metres steeplechase and the 5000 metres within a few days. The question I wanted to answer then was simple: how did she distribute her effort across three finals, and how was the recovery window between them managed? The official results carried no splits. I still cannot answer it with numbers.

This is what I want to dissect: when the only published document is a final mark, every professional analysis collapses into the same place.

Take one athlete. Her mark is a number. But that number only means something next to four reference points.

First, her personal best and her season's best. Without those, I do not know whether she has just touched her ceiling or her floor.

Second, the conditions. A mark produced with a two metres per second tailwind cannot be placed alongside one produced into a headwind, even if the scoreboard displays them identically. A results sheet without competition conditions is a results sheet that cannot be verified. I once spent three weeks reconstructing wind and temperature at a youth meet simply because the official results had no such column.

Third, equipment. Carbon-plated shoes have changed distance running over the past decade, and every athletics system with a data culture records which shoe model each athlete wore at each meet. Here, that information exists as word of mouth.

Fourth, race structure. Who set the pace, who kicked, did our athlete open up in the last 400 metres or the last 100? Without splits, I am only guessing.

In the pandemic season of 2026, when every track closed, I sat down with my own archive. The pandemic closed the track. I opened Excel. Four years of competition sat in twenty thousand rows — and I discovered I had recorded enough to rebuild race structures, but only for international meets that published splits. The Vietnamese section of that spreadsheet was a large empty block.

That is why I say it plainly: the problem with Vietnamese athletics is not in the athletes' legs. It is that we have no mechanism for knowing where those legs are.

Look at the strong athletics nations in the region and the gap is not in raw talent. Japanese runners are not faster. They record every two hundred metres. Their ekiden system survives because every leg has data, and that data itself creates pressure to improve across the whole system. An athlete who knows exactly how many seconds she lost on the third leg knows what to fix. An athlete who only knows she finished second only knows she has to try harder.

Six indicators I always want when analysing a Vietnamese athlete: her personal-best curve year by year, her season's best, how many times she competed in the season, the recovery gaps between rounds, her accumulated injury rate, and the difference between her heat and her final. None of the six is a secret. All six sit in the coach's notebook.

The problem is that between the notebook and a data system there is a gap nobody is paid to close. A coach keeping records for his athlete is a decent thing to do. Building a national database that reporters, researchers and the athletes themselves can query is the work of an organisation — it needs people, machines, process.

There is also the trap on the other side, once the numbers start arriving. A mark set with a strong tailwind, on a fast track, or in an expensive pair of shoes does not reflect true ability unless the advantage is subtracted. One good run does not establish a stable level. And the “training marks” passed around by word of mouth — no official, no camera, no record — are a category I never use.

There is an unspoken belief in our sporting circles: keeping data private protects the athlete, while publishing it creates pressure and exposes weaknesses.

That belief is wrong at the level of mechanism. Data is not a weapon against an athlete. It is the only asset she has in the market.

Look at it from a sponsor's side. A brand considering a contract asks three questions: is this athlete rising or falling, how often does she compete in a year, and is her form consistent. In many sporting nations, the answer fits on one data page. Here, the answer is a feeling: “She has potential.” Potential cannot be priced. A performance curve can.

Vietnamese women's athletics does not need pity. It needs to be measured with the same ruler as the rest of the world — the same wind gauge, the same publication standard, the same split recording. Once the data gap is closed, people will stop arguing about whether a mark is worthy and start arguing about tactics.

One more thing is rarely said at conferences: most of the commercial value of a track and field athlete does not lie in the medal but in the verifiable story around it. Because of the noise from intermediaries, we have let that story be told by people who have no data.

Change is happening, but from the bottom up. I know at least four young coaches in three provinces recording splits for their athletes on phones and free spreadsheets. I know a group of sports students rebuilding youth meet results from photographs of scoreboards. Vietnamese athletics data may well begin with those files, not with a decision from above.

And if in three years an eighteen-year-old girl can publish her own performance curve before signing her first contract, the only question left will be: how many years did we lose because nobody started sooner?