Vietnamese Athletics: The Data Gap on the Track

Vietnamese Athletics: The Data Gap on the Track

Late afternoon at a provincial stadium, a young athlete lunges across the finish line amid the cheers of a few dozen relatives. No electronic scoreboard. No timing chip on the ankle. Only a hand-held stopwatch in the trembling palm of an official who has stood in the sun for four hours. The performance of that seventeen-year-old boy, the distillation of a year of training, of dawn runs on the sand, of a pair of shoes worn down at the soles, is compressed into a single number that no one but that official can confirm. The coach writes it into a notebook already yellowed with age. Then the notebook lies still in a drawer.

I sat in the stands that day, and what haunted me was not the medal, but the thing that vanished the moment the race ended: data. In many developed athletics nations, data is treated as the blood of the entire system. Here, it dissolves into the air like breath at noon in summer. In twenty-eight years of holding a pen, I have watched Vietnamese athletics reach no small number of peaks, and I have also watched no small number of talents wither in silence. What separates those two fates, I believe, is not the legs but something more invisible: the ability to record, measure, and understand oneself.

In a country where athletics is still often called "the queen of sports" yet survives on scattered SEA Games medals, the data gap is not a dry technical story. It is the story of dreams forgotten in drawers. For many years, our national performance system has relied largely on paper, on coaches' memories, and on manual measurements. At every meet, results are copied by hand, sent to the federation, and then slowly enter a database that few ever consult again. When an athlete asks, "How much have I improved over three years?", the answer is usually a silence.

What is worth noting is that we do not lack talent. Looking at recent SEA Games editions, Vietnamese athletics still steadily brings home gold medals in middle-distance running, steeplechase, and the marathon. Names such as Nguyen Thi Oanh, Nguyen Thi Huyen, Quach Thi Lan, Bui Thi Thu Ha, and Nguyen Van Lai have become symbols of a golden generation. But behind those medals lies a paradox: we are better at producing athletes than at understanding them. We know they run fast, but we often do not know exactly why, and still less do we know what to do to repeat that systematically.

I once spent an afternoon sitting with a veteran coach in central Vietnam. He opened his notebook, pointed at the scrawled numbers, and said something I have never forgotten: "I know my student is tired, but I do not know how tired." That is the essence of the data gap. It is not a lack of understanding, but a lack of tools to turn intuition into evidence. A good coach still senses the breathing, the complexion, the footfall of a student. But sensing cannot replace measuring heart rate, lactate levels, distance, and pace in every session. And without those numbers, every decision about the training plan, about increasing or decreasing load, becomes a gamble.

The greatest gap in Vietnamese athletics is not in the athletic qualities of the athletes, but in the data infrastructure and the recording culture that remain too thin to turn potential into lasting achievement.

Look at how leading Asian athletics nations such as Japan or China operate. There, every athlete from the school level has a digital technical profile that follows them throughout their career. Every training session, every competition, every physiological metric is stored, analyzed, and compared over time. When an athlete plateaus, the sports science team can trace back through the data chain to find the cause: a nagging injury, an overload period, or a change in nutrition. In Vietnam, most of those questions are still answered by intuition, by word-of-mouth experience, by notebooks no one reads again.

I do not want to paint a bleak picture. On the contrary, I believe we stand before a rare opportunity. The spread of cheap GPS watches, training-tracking apps, and compact sensors has brought data tools within reach of both recreational athletes and coaches in the provinces. A watch costing a few million dong can record heart rate, distance, pace, and elevation throughout a long run. The problem is no longer a lack of devices, but a lack of a disciplined and strategic way to use them.

I once followed a young cross-country athlete all the way to where he trained, and what struck me was not his worn-out shoes but the running diary he had kept for years. Thousands of pages recorded every run, every ache, every tired day. He had no laboratory, no analyst, but he had the most important thing: the patience to record himself. It was that diary, not raw talent alone, that helped him understand his body deeply enough to make a leap forward. It is a crude but powerful form of data, proof that the core issue is not ultra-sophisticated technology but habit.

Yet that habit cannot rest on individual will alone. It needs a supporting system. Imagine a young athlete in a mountainous district, where his coach changes every few years due to rotation policy. Each new teacher starts from zero, not knowing the student's training past, not knowing where he was once injured, not knowing which month his peak form falls in. With a continuous digital profile, the new teacher would inherit an athlete with full context rather than a blank page. This is precisely where data shifts from a measuring tool to a protective tool.

There is a small detail I always think about when discussing Vietnamese athletics. In middle-distance events, the gap between Vietnamese athletes and the continent's top rivals is often measured in a few seconds. A few seconds sounds small, but over 1,500 meters it equals being left a dozen meters behind in the finishing kick. And the interesting thing is that, in many cases, those few seconds come not from top speed but from the tactics of distributing effort. An athlete who knows exactly how many seconds to run the first lap, the second, and how much reserve to keep for the final lap has an enormous advantage over one running by feel. But to know those numbers, you must measure. You must have data from time trials, from competitions, from simulation sessions.

In developed athletics nations, analyzing split times is basic. Coaches can look at data to know where a student faded, accelerated too early or too late, and adjust the training plan accordingly. In Vietnam, most provincial meets, and even some national meets, still record only the final result. We know how long the winner took, but not how they ran. We lose the most valuable layer of information, the layer that can teach the next generation how to run correctly.

A record is only a shadow; the person is the track. A performance number does not tell us how many times that athlete cried in the locker room, how many family gatherings they missed, how much of their youth they cut away to stand at the starting line. But data, if collected correctly, can tell us something else equally important: how an ordinary person can reach their own limit, and how that limit need not become a wall that collapses on their career.

I remember an evening over coffee with a young coach in Da Nang who had tried applying tactical analysis ideas to his amateur team. He told me that after he began recording heart rate and each athlete's subjective feeling after every session, he discovered something surprising: those he thought were lazy turned out to be overtraining, and those he thought were diligent turned out to be training below the necessary threshold. The intuition of a good coach, it turns out, still has blind spots. Data does not replace intuition, but it illuminates the places intuition cannot see.

That story reminds me of a concept I often cite: control by ceding control. The same applies on the track. A wise coach does not try to control every step of a student, but creates a system for the student to understand themselves, adjust themselves, and take responsibility for themselves. Data is precisely that empowering tool. When athletes see the chart of their own progress, they no longer run blindly on their teacher's word but begin to run toward a goal they clearly understand. That is the difference between being ordered and being guided.

But I must also be honest: the path to building data infrastructure for Vietnamese athletics is far from smooth. It demands initial investment, demands training people, and most importantly, demands a shift in mindset. We are used to judging success by medals, by rankings, by flashy numbers in the news. Building a database does not yield medals immediately, does not create those moments of bursting emotion in the stands. It is quiet, patient work, like watering a forest that only shows its shade ten years later. In a sport still heavily dependent on short-term results, that is no small challenge.

There is a paradox I have witnessed: we are ready to spend billions of dong on a short overseas training stint, yet hesitant to invest in a long-term data storage system. That stint may bring home a medal, but when the athlete retires, the knowledge leaves with them. A data system, once built correctly, stays forever, serving many generations. This is an investment question that I believe any sports administrator should consider seriously.

I am not a tech zealot. I have written too much about failures, injuries, and tears after the finish line to understand that sport is never just numbers. But precisely for that reason, I believe all the more that data must serve people, not the reverse. A heart-rate metric never tells the whole story of an athlete struggling with fear before a big race. A progress chart never replaces a teacher's pat on the shoulder in the moment a student wants to quit. Data is a companion, not a master.

There are athletes who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory. They are the ones who dropped out mid-race because of injury, the ones never written into the golden board, the ones whose best performances lie in a notebook no one reads again. If we had a good enough data system, perhaps we could have seen their injury signs earlier, adjusted the training plan to save their careers. Every athlete who withers for lack of data is a loss we cannot measure in medals.

What is encouraging is that in recent years I have seen signs of change. Some national sports training centers have begun equipping lactate meters, dedicated heart-rate monitors, and training-analysis software. Some young, well-trained coaches bring back new methods. The boom in recreational races across the country has created a new generation of runners accustomed to tracking metrics, to setting personal goals, and to measuring progress. Those recreational runners, with GPS watches on their wrists and apps on their phones, may be quietly teaching the professional side of athletics a lesson in data culture.

I once ran with a group of recreational athletes in Da Nang at five in the morning. They ran along the beach, watches blinking numbers, and after each run they sat down to analyze pace, heart rate, and how each of them felt. The scene made me both happy and wistful. Happy that a new generation is forming with a measuring mindset. Wistful that our professional athletes, who have far greater potential, often lack comparable data care. There is a strange inversion: those who run for passion are better equipped than those who run for a living.

In athletics, there is a concept called periodization. An athlete's year is divided into phases: a base-building phase, an intensity phase, a competition phase, and a recovery phase. How load and intensity are distributed across each phase determines whether peak form lands on the important competition. Without data, that distribution rests on experience and the competition calendar. With data, one can calculate to bring an athlete to peak on the right day. This is where a few percent of difference can create a few seconds on the track.

I remember once following an athlete preparing for a SEA Games. In the final weeks, her coach had to decide how much to reduce training load so the body would recover without losing form. Without precise data, the decision rested largely on feel. Her competition result was not bad, but I always wondered: with full data, could she have reached a higher performance? It is a question without an answer, and the very impossibility of answering is the most regrettable thing.

There is one point I want to stress to those who doubt the value of data in a sport still facing many hardships. Data need not mean expensive systems or modern laboratories. It can begin with the smallest things: a training diary kept regularly, a chart tracking weight and sleep, a note about how you felt after each run. Those crude data, gathered patiently over many years, can become a treasure. The most important thing is not the tool but the discipline and the belief that recording is worthwhile.

I once talked with a retired athlete. He said his greatest regret was not the medals he failed to win, but that he did not know how he had progressed throughout his career. He ran by feel, by his teacher's word, by the competition calendar, and looking back, he had no clear picture of himself. An entire career, an entire youth, passed without leaving a measurable trace. It is a silent loss that I believe many Vietnamese athletes endure.

There is another aspect of the data gap few mention: transparency. When performances are not recorded and published systematically, not only the athlete loses, but the public and the media lose too. Fans have no way to track the progress of young talents, to understand who is rising and who is plateauing. Journalists like me often have to rely on memory and scattered notes to tell the story of athletics. With an open, transparent database, the story of Vietnamese athletics would be richer and would attract more public interest.

I have always believed that sport is a common language, and athletics is its most primitive tongue. Running, jumping, throwing: these are the most basic human movements. But to speak that language fluently, one must be taught, trained, and understood. And data, in a sense, is the grammar of that language. Without grammar, one can still speak, but it is hard to speak well. Vietnamese athletics has spoken simple sentences, short sentences. Now is the time to learn to speak longer, more complex, and more beautiful ones.

I do not expect a data revolution overnight. Real change in sport always happens slowly, quietly, and usually begins with the least noticed people. A coach decides to record more meticulously. An athlete decides to monitor their body more closely. An administrator decides to spend budget on storage software instead of a short training trip. Those small decisions, added up, can create a large change over time.

Athletics and life are alike in one respect: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right path. The one who runs the right path is not the one with perfect legs, but the one who knows clearly where they are, what they have passed, and how far remains. Data, in its purest form, is the map that helps a runner find their own road.

Looking back at the journey of Vietnamese athletics, I see a red thread running through: we have always been strong in will, in perseverance, in the ability to endure hardship. Those qualities have brought us proud victories. But in a sporting world increasingly driven by science, will alone is no longer enough. We need accuracy, understanding, and above all the humility to admit that we still do not know much about the very people running on our own tracks.

My heroes never lift a trophy; they only whisper to the grass of the arena. And to hear those whispers, we must learn to record them before they dissolve into silence.

Night falls, and I sit in my study, opening my own notebook from many years ago. The numbers, the names, the performances have faded with time. I ask myself, if I had recorded more carefully then, if I had measured more precisely then, would the story I tell today be different. Perhaps it would. And perhaps, if each of us, from runner to writer, from teacher to administrator, began to record just a little more accurately, then ten years from now Vietnamese athletics would have a treasure trove of data to be proud of, and a generation of athletes who understand themselves more deeply.

That is not a distant goal. It begins with the smallest act: opening a new notebook, and recording tomorrow's first run.