The "martial arts" label is blurring Vietnam's real achievements

In the last three SEA Games, most of Vietnam's martial arts medals came from events where nobody got hit. Wushu taolu, taekwondo poomsae, karate kata, Vovinam quyen: three to five judges sit at the scoring table and mark difficulty, precision and execution. I ticked off every line of the organisers' results sheet by hand, because no database would split those two groups for me. That night in Hai Phong, I realised Vietnamese media call two entirely different sports by the same name.

The issue is a classification issue, and it is not as small as people assume. The official SEA Games, Asian Games or Olympic programme has no category called martial arts. Organisers list each sport: wushu, taekwondo, karate, judo, pencak silat, boxing, muay, kickboxing, wrestling, fencing, vovinam. Only when results reach the medal table, the news bulletins and analysts' spreadsheets does everything get pushed into one shared label. Budgets, coaching quotas, recruitment targets, form reading and fan expectations all get mixed in. When a data system tags both a staff routine and a punch as martial_arts, it must add a warning line: this label is unclassified. Without splitting, every comparison downstream is meaningless.

I split with a single criterion: who decides the result. Judges decide, that is the performance group. Opponents decide, that is the combat group. The performance group covers wushu taolu, taekwondo poomsae, karate kata, Vovinam quyen, pencak silat seni. The combat group covers boxing, muay, kickboxing, taekwondo kyorugi, karate kumite, pencak silat tanding and MMA. They differ from training load to career curve. Performance athletes hold their peak until nearly thirty-five, because their bodies mainly carry the load of a routine. Combat athletes lose reaction speed fastest after twenty-eight, and every bout subtracts from career length.

My own count, built from the published results of recent SEA Games, shows most of Vietnam's martial arts golds sit in the performance group. The explanation lies in risk structure: a routine depends on a training process, a bout depends on the draw. Chau Tuyet Van and Vietnam's poomsae team collected medals at both regional and world level. Duong Thuy Vi held the top spot in wushu taolu across many Games. In the combat group the medals are thinner and the end product is different: Nguyen Thi Tam competed at the Tokyo Olympics, Truong Dinh Hoang once held a WBA Asia belt, Nguyen Tran Duy Nhat won Muay world titles several times. One side counts Games medals, the other counts professional belts and Olympic tickets.

The index I count myself in the combat group is counter-strike rhythm: how often a fighter throws back within the first five seconds after conceding a point. Reviewing dozens of domestic boxing and muay bouts, the average sits near one and a half per conceded point, and it looks very different beside international bouts. That index means nothing if applied to a taolu routine, because nobody throws back there. That is why I refuse one shared yardstick for both groups.

This matters because money follows labels. A province chasing quick results usually picks performance events: low cost, stable medals, low injury risk. A centre trying to produce professional fighters must invest for years, while Vietnam still has almost no combat league that pays a living wage. The shared label means both groups are praised and criticised with one measure, even though their coaches can barely trade places. I once asked a boxing coach in Hai Phong about teaching poomsae to his fighters; he laughed: routines teach body control, but they do not teach you to take a hook to the liver.

Here is where I can be wrong. Splitting labels sounds scientific, but at grassroots level the shared label is what keeps money in martial arts. Parents signing a child up usually do not care whether the kid will fight kyorugi or train poomsae; they care the child is fit, disciplined and has a medal to show. Cut it into ten separate sports and each gets only a share of sponsorship, coverage and audience. The combat group could suffer first, since it already gets little media and has no strong professional league. I got EURO 2026 wrong, not because I lacked information, but because I trusted the crowd. This time the crowd says split it for clarity, so I remind myself that clarity in classification does not create money by itself.

To understand a match, I look at the defeat before the match. Here, the defeat to look at first is a classification defeat: we let one shared label hide two sports with two different development cycles. The reverse trap is not meant to fight the players, it is meant to fight prejudice. The prejudice here is the default belief that if it is all called martial arts, every achievement can be compared with every other.

I am not asking organisers to split the label on the SEA Games medal table. I am asking for one line of notes in every bulletin: this medal was decided by judges or by opponents. If the next regional Games cuts at least one taolu or poomsae event and adds one combat event, come back to this piece to check. People call me the one who swims upstream; I call it the way I keep myself awake.