Vietnamese Athletics: A 74-Cell Data Audit and 68 Blanks

One Tuesday morning I opened a spreadsheet with seventy-four cells. It tracked a group of Vietnamese track and field athletes entering an international competition cycle. Sixty-eight of those cells read: N/A. The remaining six held a name, a date of birth, a home province, an event, a coach's name and a phone number.

Numbers never lie. They only wait for someone calm enough to listen. Those three letters told me more than any medal the group had ever won. They said we are training, competing and celebrating, but we are not recording. And a sport that does not record cannot correct itself, because there is nothing to compare, nothing to challenge, nothing to pass to the next generation.

Three letters cost more than a medal

Most arguments in Vietnamese sport are not arguments about facts. They are arguments about memory. A coach remembers his athlete running the 400 metres in "about 47 seconds". A reporter writes "close to the national record". An official says "form is improving". Three sentences, three numbers, none verifiable.

In that 74-cell file, the blanks sit exactly where decisions are made. Personal best this season: blank. Number of competitions in twelve months: blank. Difference between the first and last segment of a race: blank. History of Achilles, hamstring and heel injuries: blank. Weekly strength sessions: blank. Whether the wind reading at the best jump was legal: blank.

These blanks are cheap to fill. No laboratory, no imported GPS, no foreign data contract. They need one person responsible for recording, one standard form, and one rule that the record survives the session. Together, those cost less than a three-week overseas camp.

Where Vietnamese athletics stands

Context matters before I continue, so that no one reads this as a denial of achievement. Vietnamese athletics has had a strong decade at regional level. At the SEA Games hosted in Hanoi in May 2026, Vietnam topped the overall table, and athletics delivered a large share of that, through athletes such as Nguyen Thi Oanh, Nguyen Thi Huyen, Quach Thi Lan, Ngan Ngoc Nghia and Tran Dinh Son. Earlier, at the 2026 Asian Games in Jakarta, Bui Thi Thu Thao won women's long jump gold with 6.55 metres — Vietnam's first Asian Games athletics gold.

Those are real events with dates and numbers. The problem lies elsewhere: behind those numbers there is almost no published data series an outsider can audit.

Take the 6.55-metre jump. A long jump mark only means something when tied to four variables: approach speed over the final twenty metres, number of strides, take-off angle, and the wind reading at the moment of the jump. Recorded, those four variables answer the question every developed athletics nation asks: did the mark come from speed, from technique, from favourable conditions, or from all three? Without them we have a name and a result. A name and a result is news. Four numbers is knowledge.

Dissecting a performance into an equation

My method, and what I still teach young reporters, is to break a performance into independent variables and see which contributes most. For a running event the rough equation includes reaction time, peak speed, mid-race average speed, rate of deceleration at the end, and environmental conditions.

Late-race deceleration is the most neglected variable in Vietnam. A 47-second 400 metres can be run two very different ways: fast first 200 metres then collapse in the last 100, or even distribution. Both look identical on the scoreboard, but only one has room to improve. The first has hit its physiological ceiling. The second still has headroom.

Without split data, both athletes sit on the same line of the file, receive the same camp slot and are expected in the same way. That is how a sport wastes potential with no one accountable, because there is no evidence to assign responsibility to.

I once saw the reverse in football. In 2026, as a data reporter in Nha Trang, I published a series using expected goals against to show that a defence praised as the league's best was in fact conceding more than it should, with a goalkeeper save rate of only 64 percent. The coaching staff called me a man sitting in a cold room. Months later the club lost 0-3 in an AFC play-off, exactly the script the data had drawn.

What I took from it is not that data is always right. It is that when data is absent, people default to believing reputation. And reputation is an indicator with a very long lag.

Wind, altitude and shoes

A second group of variables is barely handled seriously in Vietnamese publication: the physical conditions of competition.

In sprints and jumps, a tailwind above two metres per second makes a mark ineligible as a record. That is a universal rule, not the severity of one federation. But to apply it, organisers need a working anemometer, must record the reading at the moment of the action, and must publish it with the result. At many national meets, the wind column on the electronic scoreboard shows only a dash.

A dash in the wind column means every sprint and jump mark at that meet floats in terms of value. They exist, they win medals, but they cannot be compared with any other mark, including the athlete's own at another meet.

Altitude is the second variable. Thin air at altitude reduces drag and tends to improve sprint results. Vietnam's terrain is varied enough to turn this into a training advantage, but altitude has never entered our models.

The third variable is equipment. Carbon-plated shoes with super-elastic foams have shifted the baseline of track performance over the past decade, to the point where federations had to cap stack height. A Vietnamese athlete switching from standard shoes to a carbon-plated model can improve a distance personal best without changing training load at all. If shoe type is not recorded, we will keep confusing fitness gains with equipment gains — in both directions.

The base series we forget

Before I trust reputation, I need to see the data behind it. For a young athlete, the most valuable data is not the best mark but the series over time.

A 19-year-old who runs 10.8 seconds in the 100 metres after improving steadily by 0.05 seconds a year for four straight years is a forecast. An athlete of the same age who runs 10.8 after a single spike, having sat at 11.3 in the preceding months, is an event. A forecast and an event require completely different investment. In my 74-cell file, both are recorded as one number: 10.8.

Based on my experience watching national athletics meets over many years, single spikes usually come from three sources: unusually favourable conditions, a planned taper that landed in competition week, or a change in recovery. All three are good and worth learning from, but none guarantees repetition.

The danger of small samples is that they create belief faster than the data allows. One fast run, one international slot, then disappointment, then the conclusion that the athlete is mentally weak. That conclusion is usually wrong. The real issue is that the athlete never had a stable base to reproduce, and we never measured that base because we never wrote it down.

A season should read as a probability series

A season should be read as a chain of probabilities, not a chain of events. The event reading gives us a medal list. The probability reading gives us a distribution, a volatility measure, and the likelihood of hitting a threshold at a given moment.

For middle-distance athletes I track three variables: season's best, best in standard conditions, and the number of competitions at or above 98 percent of personal best. The third, consistency, matters more than the first. An athlete at 98 percent of best in six of eight outings can contest a final. An athlete who peaks once and then fluctuates below 94 percent in the other seven is an athlete without a system.

Without per-competition data, consistency is invisible. That is why so many Vietnamese selections rest on the feel of a single moment, while an international slot requires someone who can repeat that moment twice in three days.

Fourteen home matches and the value of a natural experiment

In 2026, when Vietnamese stadiums closed because of the pandemic, I got an opportunity the sports data industry rarely receives: a natural experiment.

I compared fourteen home matches with spectators against ten without, for the same club. Expected goals created in the first group reached 1.85 per match; in the second it fell to 1.31. A gap of nearly 29 percent. That small study helped me sign a full-time data consultancy contract with a club, and it taught me something directly applicable to athletics.

That lesson: in normal conditions, too many variables act at once to isolate causes. Only when one variable is suddenly removed does the rest become visible. In an empty stadium I heard what twenty thousand people used to drown out: the data.

Vietnamese athletics needs such natural experiments, but deliberately. A meet held at different altitude. A block of reduced training volume. A change of shoe model. Each change, recorded with numbers before and after, becomes a permanent piece of data. If the result is not recorded, we spent a camp slot buying a memory instead of a lesson.

Qualification and the time window

At international level, entry into major athletics meets comes through three routes: hitting a standard inside a defined window, accumulating ranking points, or receiving a quota. Each route has its own technical character. The standard route demands one performance at the right moment, meaning a planned peak. The ranking route demands competition density and consistency, meaning spread load. The two can pull in opposite directions, and choosing wrongly costs a year.

In that 74-cell file, the standard window cell is blank. The expected number of meets inside the window is blank. The priority ranking between meets is blank. The competition plan is therefore decided sequentially: whichever meet comes first gets entered, whichever feels important gets the resources. That works at regional level, where the gap is wide enough that an off-peak athlete still wins. At continental level it almost always fails, and the failure is labelled "poor form" instead of its real name: bad planning.

Injury: the most dangerous blank

Of all the blanks, injury history disturbs me most. Athletics is highly repetitive and loads a small set of structures. For middle and long distance, the high-risk group is the Achilles tendon, hamstrings, plantar fascia and foot bones. For sprints and jumps, hamstrings, Achilles and knee. A coach without an athlete's injury history cannot distinguish adaptive pain from developing damage.

Injury data has another value few consider: it measures the quality of the training programme itself. A group with high recurrent hamstring injury over two consecutive seasons usually reflects speed work increased too fast, or a missing introduction phase to high intensity. That is fixable by adjusting the schedule — but to fix it, you must know. To know, you must record.

What cannot be measured should not be written, I tell young reporters. But the distinction matters: do not write when you have no numbers, and do not neglect to record when you can. The first is professional discipline. The second is institutional discipline.

What a coach teaches without data

Every time I ask, I get the same answer: experience.

Experience is a form of data, and I do not dismiss it. A coach with twenty years on the track holds a rich internal model of how a body responds to load. But experience has three structural limits. It is tied to a narrow sample — the athletes he happened to coach. It favours standout cases and forgets average ones, while sporting value lies in lifting the average group. And it does not transfer. When the coach retires, the model retires with him.

Recording turns personal experience into institutional assets. That is why I value a simple standard form more strategically than a new measuring device. A device changes one season. A recording system changes a generation of coaching.

Valuing athletes by medals

In football, players are valued by a set of indicators: minutes, expected goal contribution, passing success by third of the pitch, age. The transfer market can be inflated — and I still hold that paying one hundred million euros for a player with fewer than fifty top-flight matches is naked gambling. But even inside the inflation, there is an anchoring indicator set.

Vietnamese athletics has no transfer market. No fees, no wage bill, no agent negotiating. The only valuation left is medals. And a medal is the crudest indicator possible: it compresses ability, conditions, luck and the context of one day into a single character — first, second, third, or nothing.

The result is a distorted investment structure. A medallist at a regional meet receives the entire resource envelope for the next cycle, regardless of whether the underlying base is durable. An athlete who finishes fourth with a better mark than last year's bronze medallist can lose the slot. These are decisions data could correct — provided data exists.

The counterintuitive angle: transparency does not create discipline

Here is what many in the industry will not like.

The answer to 68 blank cells is not publishing everything. I have seen enough organisations dump data outward, create a professional appearance, and keep making decisions on feel. Public data without a binding process is just communications.

What is needed is a binding process. Specifically: a selection decision must cite which indicator is the basis; a competition plan must state the qualification window and the priority of each meet; an injury case must be logged with date, mechanism and expected recovery; and an equipment change must be logged with before and after results.

I worship data, but I pray through verification. A number has power only when it can be challenged, and it can be challenged only when published with a definition. In the 74-cell file, all six filled cells are administrative, not technical. That is the structure of an organisation managing people, not yet one managing performance.

Luck is the residual the model cannot explain — and I never set it to zero. But the residual is only useful when you know where your model stands. Without a model there is no residual, only surprise.

What can be done in twelve months

If I were handed those 68 blanks, I would not start by buying equipment.

Months one and two: standardise a single form, no longer than one page per athlete per week, covering four groups — volume and intensity, self-rated body state, competition or test events, and injury notes. The goal is a ten-minute job for a coach.

Months three to six: introduce split data into every internal test. No complex electronics needed; two people with stopwatches at two points and cross-checked results generate useful data. Precision matters less than methodological consistency so that measurements remain comparable.

Months seven to nine: record competition conditions — temperature, humidity, wind where equipment allows, shoe model, track surface. This layer separates real progress from progress caused by circumstance.

Months ten to twelve: establish an internal review in which every selection decision presents three indicators plus one qualitative reason in quoted form. This forces professional judgement to become written language instead of an intuition that cannot be argued with.

None of these steps needs a large budget. All need something more expensive: persistence. And persistence in record-keeping survives only when leadership reads the records every week.

Signals for the next cycle

Four signals I will watch.

First, whether national meet result sheets show a wind reading instead of a dash. It is the cheapest, easiest signal of whether an organiser genuinely cares about the scientific value of a result.

Second, whether any athlete is published with a time series rather than a single best number. When media demand series, organisations start storing series.

Third, whether hamstring and Achilles injury counts in a season are published by training group. That indicator says more about coaching quality than any medal table.

Fourth, whether next year's competition plan is published with qualification windows and meet priorities. If not, every continental failure will again be explained with the phrase "poor form" — an explanation with no indicator, no date, and no possibility of verification.

A transfer window is not a market fair. It is a cost-optimisation problem across indicators. I say that about football, but it holds for athletics with one difference: in athletics the currency is not euros but camp slots, competition entries and one year of a young person's life.

I still keep the 74-cell file. Sixty-eight blanks. I will not delete it, because one day I want to open it and count. The only way to know Vietnamese athletics has progressed is to watch the blanks shrink. No medal can replace that count. And if after twelve months the number is still sixty-eight, we will know exactly where we stand — for the first time, with a number.