Forms and Sparring: Two Scoring Scales, One Confusion

The fifth judge lowered the board. 9.1. The man beside me in the stands let out a short sound — the kind a person makes when swallowing a question halfway. Across the floor, another judge raised 9.6. Two tenths. In a forms routine that lasts under ninety seconds, two tenths is the distance between a medal and an evening spent watching someone else climb the podium. The athlete never learned where he went wrong. Highest score discarded. Lowest score discarded. The remaining three added up and divided by three. That mechanism was designed to prevent bias, and it does exactly that. But it leaves a consequence nobody planned for: the loser receives a number and no explanation. He trained six months for that routine, and that night he learned exactly one thing — that he lost. I have sat in a great many stands like that one, from provincial meets in ageing gymnasiums to national championships with electronic scoreboards. And the longer I sat, the more convinced I became that the biggest problem in Vietnamese martial arts does not sit with the referees. Vietnamese martial arts do not have one competition ruleset. They have many, and those rulesets do not speak the same language. Most traditional schools in the country — from Binh Dinh and Tay Son lineages to Nam Huynh Dao, Thieu Lam and Vovinam — run competition along two branches. The quyen branch (forms, sometimes called quyen thuat, weapons forms) is scored on a ten-point scale broken into criteria: difficulty, precision, power, rhythm, spirit. The doi khang branch (sparring) is scored by valid strikes, with additions and deductions for faults and warnings. Vovinam, founded in 2026 by Nguyen Loc, has its own technique system and its own scoring system. Every federation, every province, even every tournament can carry a slightly different rulebook in the details only insiders notice. Outside the traditional system sits another layer: boxing, muay, kickboxing, each with international rules, its own referee panels, its own scoring logic. Nguyen Tran Duy Nhat has competed in muay and kickboxing under different rulesets. Truong Dinh Hoang has held a WBA Asia belt. Those two men do not share an arena, do not share a yardstick, and nobody has the right to rank them on one board. The infrastructure underneath all of it is the written record. And this is where I want to slow down. At most domestic tournaments, the bout sheet carries the athlete's name, weight class, referee names and round-by-round scores. Paper. Sometimes retyped after the event, sometimes not. There is no national results database for sparring. There is nowhere to look up how many bouts a nineteen-year-old has fought in three years, whom he beat, whom he lost to, and how. People talk about referees. Few talk about the absence of records. The ten-point scale in the forms branch does not measure anything. It ranks, then pretends to measure. A forms routine has no weight to be weighed. It can only be compared with another routine. When judges award 9.1 and 9.6, that gap does not mean the second routine was 5.5 per cent better. It means the second routine was placed higher. But because the number looks like a measurement, the public reads it as one — and argues as though a physical unit sat behind it. The problem is the missing anchor. A ten-point scale with criteria but no anchors produces a situation where every judge builds a private ruler. What is a 9.0? Nobody defines it. So five people in one row watch one routine, produce five numbers, and the system averages five different rulers. That is arithmetic, not measurement. Dropping the highest and lowest score is a sensible reflex — it was learned from gymnastics and diving. But in those sports, judges publish detailed deduction sheets. In our forms branch, those sheets usually do not exist, or are not published. Removing outliers without compensating transparency leaves you with a cleaner number, not a clearer result. The sparring branch — the one that draws crowds and sponsorship — is the least codified in writing. The point value of a valid strike changes by tournament. The definition of a valid strike changes by tournament: contact level, permitted target areas, how clinching is handled. Some events adopt international rules; others adopt an internal regulation drafted hurriedly before opening day. The crowd is not shouting because it smells a fix. It is shouting because it does not know which rulebook is running on the floor. And here I have to be blunt: the most serious issue nobody wants to examine is weight. At many domestic youth events, weigh-in happens on the morning of competition. A seventeen-year-old cuts three to four kilos in the final forty-eight hours, with no urine testing and no medical supervision beyond a scale. International practice is generally to weigh in 24 to 30 hours out and to test urine specific gravity. The domestic system rarely has either. An athlete who wins a bout while dehydrated still goes into the record as a winner. Nobody writes into that record that he dehydrated to be in that weight class at all. I do not trust my eyes; I trust the rhythms that repeat on the floor. And the rhythm I have seen most often across years of watching domestic martial arts events is not a beautiful technique. It is a coach opening a personal notebook to check an opponent's record, because there is no other source to check. A single misspelled name is enough to tell me I have not been strict enough with myself. I once held an official results sheet on which an athlete's name was wrong by two characters. Nobody corrected it, because nobody checked. If the name is not checked, the score is not either. Above all of this sits a very concrete commercial pressure. Sponsors need a number for the banner. The sport reliably produces exactly one kind of number: medal count. So the entire story gets compressed into "gold medal", and every technical distinction between a technically sound routine and a suffocating sparring bout is erased. The media is not lazy; it is using the only number the system supplies. The public's anger is correct, but aimed at the wrong target. People point at referees. Referees are the executors of a system that never defined its own unit. Demanding a better referee inside a system without anchors is like demanding a better carpenter when the ruler is already warped. Individuals can be excellent. The system will still drift. The counterintuitive angle sits here: the forms branch, treated as the side show, is actually the more advanced branch in governance terms. It has written criteria. It publishes a scale. It fails on anchors, but it has at least tried to write down what it is measuring. The sparring branch — the one with money, crowds and sponsors — is the blurriest in writing. Public attention and governance quality in the two branches are moving in opposite directions. One more thing few want to hear: transparency will not make controversies disappear. It will prove that a great many bouts are genuinely close. That is frightening for a sport that needs tidy narratives. But a martial art willing to say "this bout was razor-thin, and here is why" is stronger than one that says "the result stands, do not ask". Discipline is not prohibition; it is clarity taken to a ruthless degree. Three things are doable within one season, without a large new budget. Publish each judge's individual score, with a deduction sheet broken down by criterion, posted on the noticeboard immediately after each rotation. Build a shared results database — name, weight class, opponent, result, method of victory, at minimum. And put urine testing into the weigh-in process for every youth age group, even when a tournament carries no international federation requirement. Collapse does not arrive from a single defeat; it arrives from the cracks nobody wants to look into. A martial art can live with defeats. It struggles to live with being unable to explain why it lost — while still calling that fairness.