Vietnam's Women's Track: Real Medals, Missing Data

At the eastern corner of the stadium, the seventh row of seats still bears paint that has not yet faded. No one sits there. Below, on the track, a female athlete has just finished the 3000-metre steeplechase, doubling over at the finish line, catching her breath, then walking off the track alone with no one to hand her a bottle of water. I checked my watch: 2:47 p.m. Forty-five minutes later, when the technical area had been cleared and the crowd had dispersed, I was still sitting alone in that empty row. "Forty-five minutes on the sidelines never grows old" — I wrote that line years ago, and every time I sit back like this, I find it a little more true. A track can produce medals, but without data it will soon be forgotten.

I have followed Vietnamese women's athletics for nearly two decades, and what troubles me most has never been the results. The results are real. They are measured in hundredths of a second, recognised by gold medals at the SEA Games, recorded in federation minutes. What is missing is data — the very thing the sports world uses to understand an athlete, while we let it fall like a sweat towel by the track.

Consider a simple question: in a single national season, how often is a female athlete's split time recorded? How often is wind speed measured when she long jumps? How often does someone note her heart rate, recovery interval, or even the name of the coach standing in the corner? At many international meets, those figures are standard. At most domestic meets, we stop at the final result: who came first, second, third. Everything in between disappears.

Athletics is a sport in which data is the language. A 1500-metre runner is judged not only by her finishing time but by how she distributes effort across laps: how she holds pace in the first lap, accelerates in the second, how much she has left in the last. Coaches read those numbers to know whether a pupil is improving or plateauing, fresh or exhausted. Without them, every judgement is mere intuition.

But in Vietnam, most women's athletics data still lives in a few people's heads. I once sat with a veteran coach in Da Nang. He opened a yellowed notebook, densely filled with a decade of his pupil's training times. Those numbers were never digitised, never shared, and when he retires they will vanish with him. That is a valuable data trove buried in a drawer, quite literally.

I once visited the home of a female athlete in central Vietnam. Her mother said she did not know how fast her daughter ran, only that the girl came home tired from training, ate a lot, and slept early. The family is part of that ecosystem, yet they too are left outside every dataset. No one sent the mother a results sheet, no one told her where her daughter stood on the map of progress in Vietnamese athletics. That invisibility begins at home.

I once watched a female long jumper break her personal best on a morning with a strong headwind. No one measured the wind speed. The result was ratified, but its true value could not be verified by anyone. In international athletics, a jump counts as a record only if wind speed is within the permitted limit — 2.0 metres per second on a straight runway. That is a basic rule. But a rule only matters if someone measures. And at many of our meets, the wind gauge either does not exist, or exists with no one operating it.

This is the crux: Vietnamese women's athletics is winning on individual effort, but losing the race to accumulate knowledge. Every medal is a closed story, never linked into a data system the next generation can learn from. A 20-year-old today may be repeating exactly the mistake a senior made ten years ago — simply because no one wrote it down.

I think of Nguyen Thi Oanh, who has become the emblem of Vietnamese women's athletics at the SEA Games. Her story is told often: a small-framed runner who has won many gold medals across middle and long distances, from 1500 metres to the 3000-metre steeplechase and then 5000 metres. But when I asked people in the profession, they said that even for an athlete as famous as her, detailed season-by-season data remains incomplete. People know she won, but few know how she won, or how she adjusted her tactics year by year.

Or Nguyen Thi Huyen, associated with the 400-metre hurdles. That event demands an extremely delicate coordination of rhythm and hurdling technique — the stride between hurdles, the number of steps, the angle of landing. All of it can be measured. But most of us only know her finishing time, not how she ran those 400 metres.

What is worth noting is that Vietnamese women's hurdling technique is by no means inferior to the region's. But the gap between a medallist and an athlete who narrowly misses a medal is sometimes just a few hundredths of a second — precisely the margin a small technical error can create. Without data to show which hurdle, which stride, the correction rests only on the coach's eye. That eye is precious, but it cannot replace thousands of frames analysed in slow motion.

This has very practical consequences. First, it makes talent selection and development a matter of guesswork. A country that wants depth in an event needs to know how many athletes are approaching the performance threshold, how fast they are progressing, who is rising, who is stalling. Without data, everything is conjecture.

Second, it leaves sports medicine reactive. Injuries in athletics seldom arrive suddenly; they accumulate. A female runner logging heavy volume over months may be entering a danger zone without anyone realising, because there is no record tracking training load, no table comparing the body's signals against actual figures. When injury strikes, people say "bad luck". But most "bad luck" is the result of a data gap ignored for too long.

Third, and perhaps most important, it means the value of a female athlete is not properly recognised. An athlete with a complete data profile will more easily convince sponsors, more easily attract media attention, and more easily build a career after retirement. Conversely, an athlete with only medals and no accompanying data story will quickly be forgotten once the spotlight fades.

Within that ecosystem, coaches are the ones who lose out most. They work on intuition and experience, but when they want to prove the effectiveness of their work, they have nothing to show but their pupils' results. A coach may have quietly lifted a pupil's performance over years, yet without comparative data that contribution will never be fully seen. And when contribution is unseen, resources do not follow.

Here I must say plainly what many colleagues avoid. Vietnamese women's athletics does not lack talent. It lacks a system. And in modern sport, the system is precisely what separates a sustainable sporting nation from a run of lucky results.

But there is a counter-argument I often hear: "What is data for when there is no money?" The reasoning goes that women's athletics is commercially unattractive, that the stands are empty, that investing in data is a luxury. This sounds reasonable, but it reverses cause and effect. The stands are not empty because women's athletics is unattractive; they are empty partly because we have never told its story in the language this era understands — the language of data.

Look at how strong sporting nations do it. They turn every run into a data-rich story: top speed, acceleration segment, fatigue index, comparison with that same athlete in the previous season. Those numbers are not dry; they are the raw material from which media weave a narrative. A young fan may not remember a championship time, but will remember the feeling of witnessing someone break their own limits — and data is what turns that moment into evidence.

So, rather than asking "what is data for", the better question is: how much longer can we endure without it? Every season that passes without being properly recorded is a season erased from collective memory. And collective memory is the foundation of all commercial value in sport.

I am not naive enough to think a single computer solves everything. The problem lies in people and in habits. Recording data is a dull discipline. It requires someone to sit down after every session, enter each figure, check each error. No one applauds that work. But it is precisely the unapplauded work that makes the difference between a mature sporting nation and one that lives on inspiration alone.

On the stands in Russia in 2026, when the whole newsroom poured into the men's World Cup, I was assigned women's football and realised something: on the stands in Russia, I heard many empty seats named after women. But then I understood that those empty seats are not only football's story. It is the story of all women's sport, including athletics. We count medals very carefully, yet we cannot count the number of stories missed. And every missed story is another empty seat added to the stands.

Back to that morning, when I sat alone in the seventh row. The girl who ran the 3000-metre steeplechase may never become famous. She may retire in a few years, return to her hometown, and her time will survive only in a few people's memories. If someone had recorded her journey — every session, every pain, every limit overcome — that story would belong to all of us, not only to her. When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices become leaders — and I believe that girl, though no one wrote her name, was already a leader in her own way.

What is changing, and I say this with grounded optimism: a younger generation of coaches is beginning to care about data. A few training centres have started using measurement devices, though still sporadically. The question is no longer "should we do it", but "how fast can we". A medal may fade in a display case, but a properly recorded data trove endures, nourishing generations of female athletes yet to appear.

Reading the scoreboard, I learned to read what is not written. And perhaps it is only when we begin to count what the scoreboard does not record that Vietnamese women's athletics truly begins to be seen.