Asiad 20, September 29: A Sepak Takraw Gold and the Silence of the Track

I sat in front of the screen at 19:05 Vietnam time, waiting for Vietnam's two 4x400m relay squads to step onto the track. A few hours earlier, in another venue of the Aichi-Nagoya sports complex, Vietnam's sepak takraw team had beaten its opponent 15-8 and 15-4, delivering the delegation's second gold medal. I only heard that roar through the phone, when a colleague called to tell me. The 400m track, I watched alone, in a familiar room.

The result arrived quietly: Vietnam's women finished fifth, the men last in the final. No time was published alongside either placing. Only rankings — and in the medal table, Vietnam's athletics column remained empty.

Thirty years in this trade taught me one thing: a placing tells you position, not distance. A fifth-place athlete might be three seconds behind the leader, or twenty. Without a stopwatch, every comparison is guesswork. And that night, the organisers handed us not a single number to hold onto.

Context: a delegation counting down

The 20th Asian Games are taking place in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. For Asian athletics this is a technically second-tier stage — it grants no direct Olympic berth — yet it is the number-one KPI for every national sports body in the region. National federations measure themselves by Asian Games medals, not by personal bests.

As of the end of September 29, Vietnam had 2 golds, 1 silver and 17 bronzes. The assigned target is 4 golds. The remaining hopes were named openly: boxing, shooting and sepak takraw. Athletics was not on that list.

That matters more than the results themselves. When a delegation publicly scratches athletics off its medal plan for the closing days, it is admitting that no athlete left can contend. This is not my reading. It is what the coaching staff said out loud.

And for me personally, it stirred a memory. Huynh Nhu's first call demolished the house of words I had once built. Before I sat down with her, I wrote about sport in adjectives. Afterwards, I learned to write with placings, with clocks, with numbers that cannot be argued with.

Core: three finals, three times outside the podium

In the women's high jump, Duong Thi Thao placed sixth. In the women's 4x400m relay, Vietnam finished fifth. In the men's 4x400m relay, Vietnam came last in the final. Three appearances in the medal round, three times short of the podium.

Read more closely, and those figures tell a different story from the one called failure. The men reaching the 4x400m final means they cleared the heats — they were among Asia's eight best teams. Finishing last in a final is not the same as failing to qualify; it is the profile of a team that reached the door but lacked the depth to climb further. Not making the final and making it but finishing last are two entirely different stories in coaching terms.

I went back to the entry list. The coaching staff gambled on a veteran cohort: Nguyen Thi Ngoc, Quach Thi Lan and Nguyen Thi Hang on the women's side; Ta Ngoc Tuong and Tran Nhat Hoang on the men's. These are faces long familiar with the SEA Games stage, where Vietnam has sat among the regional leaders for years. But the SEA Games and the Asian Games are two different worlds. A Southeast Asian final berth has never automatically translated into an Asian final berth, let alone a medal.

Reliance on veterans is the strongest systemic signal of this competition day. When a relay squad must lean on athletes past their peak, it is usually not a strategic choice but the consequence of a successor generation not yet ready. Without personal-best data, without speed splits, I cannot say who is rising and who is fading. But the shape of the roster says it on its own.

And one technical point deserves note: the 4x400m relay is an event where a single baton error can erase the whole effort. A team finishing last may be the slowest, or may be strong but thrown off rhythm in the exchange zone. I have no footage available and no error notice from the organisers. So I leave that question open.

The contrarian angle: where the money goes when medals don't come

What interests me is not the three placings. It is their consequences.

When sepak takraw delivers gold, when shooting and boxing still have a path, and athletics is done, where will money and attention flow in the next cycle? I have watched this story many times. A sport that wins no medal at this Games gets its budget cut at the next. An athlete without a medal loses sponsors. That is the cold logic of elite sport, and it is not wrong as governance — but it creates a spiral: less investment, fewer results, even less investment.

But this is where I want to pause longer. If Vietnam hits its 4-gold target without a single athletics medal, the lesson administrators may draw is that athletics is a lower-return investment than niche sports. That is a conclusion that is wrong in the long run, and I say this as someone who has followed Vietnam's track for four decades.

Athletics is the foundational sport. The speed, endurance and explosive power the track forges are what feed every other discipline, from football to basketball to volleyball. Cutting athletics to fund medal-friendly sports is selling the roots to buy the fruit. I wrote about women's football for years, and I understand one thing: sports deemed secondary are always judged by short-term measures. People see a match; I see destinies passing the ball. People see a fifth-place ranking; I see a generation running with no one to hand over to.

It is also worth saying plainly what was missing. A 4x400m final with no time published is unusual in professional athletics reporting. It suggests the day's bulletin was compiled from a non-specialist source, not from an athletics correspondent on site. This does not change the placings, but it changes how we should read them: this is data pending verification, not settled data.

What remains

I am old, but every call from them makes me young again. On the night of September 29, no one called. The track was silent. Yet within that silence I heard a question bigger than any medal: are we building an athletics programme to win one Games, or to raise a generation that can run for the next twenty years?

The answer is not in this year's medal table. It is in the entry list of the next Asiad, when I will look to see how many new names appear on the 400m track.