Vietnamese Athletics: The Gold Medal and the Still-Empty Notebook

On the stands of Mỹ Đình Stadium on a May evening in 2026, I jumped to my feet as Nguyễn Thị Oanh entered the final lap of the women's 3000m steeplechase. The girl from Bắc Giang pulled away from the pack, the gap widening with every metre. When her feet crossed the finish line, the whole stadium seemed to erupt. It was Oanh's third gold medal at a single SEA Games, a milestone no Vietnamese track and field athlete had ever reached.

Back at the hotel, I opened my notebook and realised it was almost empty. Three golds. Three events. One name. That was everything I managed to write down while walking the track. A scoreboard only records numbers; the story lives in the gaps between them.

That gap is what has troubled me throughout my years in this profession.

SEA Games 31 in Hà Nội was the edition where Vietnamese athletics stepped out as host and reaped remarkable results. Nguyễn Thị Oanh shone brightest, sweeping three gold medals in the 1500m, 5000m and 3000m steeplechase. What deserves attention is that Oanh competed in far from normal health: she lives with kidney disease, and every trip to the track is one more time her body must endure more than her rivals'.

But if someone asked me what Oanh's final-lap speed in the 1500m was, or how she distributed her pace across the first and last 400m, I would have to stay silent. Not because I did not watch, but because such data is almost never recorded systematically in Vietnamese athletics.

This is what I have observed after years wandering between sports: in football, people are used to dense statistical tables on passes, distance covered and pressing metrics. In athletics, where every hundredth of a second matters, we tend to remember only the medal and forget the process that produced it.

Vietnamese athletics is winning medals faster than we are building the data systems to understand ourselves.

I do not say this to diminish the achievement. On the contrary, precisely because the results are so beautiful, the data gap is all the more regrettable. A 3000m steeplechaser needs not only endurance but also hurdling technique, pace distribution and a remarkably steady competitive mind. That is a complex equation, one worth dissecting with numbers rather than applause alone.

With enough data, we would know how Oanh improved her personal bests year by year and where her true limit lies on the international stage.

Here I want to tell an old story. In 2026, I began working as a young commentator for a local sports channel in Đà Nẵng. My debut was U21 Vietnam against U21 Bournemouth at Hòa Xuân Stadium, and I mispronounced a striker's name three times in the first half. Out of shame, I spent the following month rewatching footage of the entire tournament, noting every run and every pronunciation. My muddled debut in 2026 taught me that the pitch always has its own way of telling the truth.

The truth the pitch told me that day was simple: if I do not write it down, I will forget.

That lesson followed me when I turned to observing athletics. Athletics is the most transparent sport in terms of results, because electronic timing measures to the hundredth of a second and there is no dispute like an offside goal. But precisely because the results are so clear, we grow lazy about understanding the causes behind them.

We know how many minutes Oanh took to run the 3000m steeplechase, but not how she prepared for it over many months.

This is where I want to offer a somewhat contrarian view. Many argue that the problem of Vietnamese athletics lies in a lack of funding, facilities or talented athletes. I do not deny those difficulties. But there is a less-discussed problem: we lack the habit of recording and analysing data seriously.

Football is ever-changing — a line I said in Đà Nẵng in 2026, and it still holds. But athletics changes no less; its changes are simply slower and quieter, and therefore easier to overlook. An athlete may spend a whole year shaving a few seconds off a personal best, and without data we will not notice the progress until it erupts into a medal.

I once witnessed this in another way. In 2026, when the pandemic suspended competitions worldwide, I organised a FIFA Online 4 simulation tournament between V.League clubs and commentated on it myself. The match drew nearly 30,000 viewers. What surprised me was not the number but that audiences thrilled to detailed stat sheets: who ran the most, who passed most accurately, which team pressed most effectively.

Sports fans, it turns out, hunger for data. They simply have not been given it in the sports they love with all their hearts.

People call me a wanderer between sports, just searching for a shared heartbeat. That shared heartbeat, I believe, is the story behind the number. A cyclist, a swimmer or a girl running the 3000m steeplechase all share one thing: a quiet preparation the public rarely sees.

I do not demand that Vietnamese athletics copy the data models of European football, because each sport has its own character. But a decent notebook, even one holding only basic indices of results, pace and year-on-year progress, would help us understand and cherish our athletes more deeply.

With enough data, the story of Nguyễn Thị Oanh would be more than a girl beating illness to win a medal. It would be the story of a process measured, analysed and properly valued.

I believe Vietnamese athletics stands before an opportunity. The current generation of athletes has enough talent to create miracles. What is missing is a generation of professionals willing to sit down, take notes and turn every track into a lesson that can be passed on.

A gold medal can be hung on a wall and admired. But a notebook filled to the brim can sustain an entire sport for decades.

And I still keep my notebook, its pages still blank, waiting for the day they are filled.