Two Empty Chairs in the Judges' Row: How Vietnamese Traditional Martial Arts Misread Themselves

A national traditional martial arts arena, a late-August afternoon. Seven chairs are set up in the judges' row on the east stand, but only five are occupied. Two sit empty. No announcement, no explanation. On the electronic scoreboard, the men's 68kg class still displays "updating" for forty minutes after the final has ended, while the stands have already emptied out. A child in the crowd asks his mother: "Who won, Mom?" She looks up at the board, then around, then says nothing.

I write the two empty chairs in my notebook, right next to the number 68. Ten years in the commentary seat covering martial arts in Bangkok taught me one thing: an empty chair never lies — it only exposes what we don't want to hear. In a martial tradition nearly a century deep, what we don't want to hear is rarely about the fighters; it's about the organizers' record book.

A populous martial tradition with thin data

Vietnamese traditional martial arts do not lack practitioners. Vovinam alone — the system founded by master Nguyen Loc in 2026 in Hanoi — has spread to dozens of countries and appeared in the SEA Games program from the 2026 edition in Jakarta, continuing at several regional Games afterward. Alongside Vovinam, hundreds of other traditional schools stretch across the provinces, each with its own form, its own way of naming techniques, its own belt system. In many villages, the dojo is still where children learn their first lesson in discipline, before they learn the multiplication table.

That is cultural wealth. But it is also what creates a data gap. While boxing, taekwondo, or judo operate on ranking systems, athlete files, and competition databases standardized down to the round, Vietnamese traditional martial arts rely largely on the memory of insiders: who beat whom, at which tournament, with which technique. Those things are passed on by word of mouth more often than written down, and every retelling nudges the number up a little.

I once asked three different coaches for the win count of a fighter who had won a national medal. Three answers, three different numbers, nearly ten fights apart. No one lied. There was simply no shared source to check against. When a martial art cannot agree on the win count of its own champion, it does not lack glory — it lacks memory.

When the measure becomes ritual

In modern combat sports, referees score on a verifiable framework: strikes landed on target, degree of impact, number of times controlling the exchange. Every point can be traced to a specific moment on video. Vietnamese traditional martial arts take a different path. Most tournaments still score by the judges' perception, where "beautiful" and "correct" are categories defined on the spot, shifting with each panel, each region, each year.

This is not wrong in traditional terms. But it creates a problem of measurability. Based on my experience following these bouts, I spent several months recording the score sheets of a number of traditional martial arts tournaments, and what caught my attention was not the fights but the blanks in the sheets. The "technical score" column was sometimes left empty. The "time" column was sometimes recorded as an estimate. Technique names were written in different ways for the same movement, to the point that they could not be grouped for analysis. One panel called a movement a "roundhouse kick," another called it a "sweeping kick," a third called it a "side kick" — and no document confirmed they were the same.

What you measure on the screen is not the appeal — it is what you hear in the silence. And in the silence of those blanks, a martial tradition is blurring itself.

There is a paradox few notice. Traditional martial arts tournaments often draw bigger crowds than modern combat sports at the same level. People come for the forms, for the village-festival atmosphere, for the drumbeat. But precisely because the appeal lies in ritual rather than numbers, organizers have little incentive to keep records. No one asks "who won and by what score," so no one needs to write it down. The appeal of ritual becomes a convenient reason not to measure — and that is the softest trap of any tradition-based system.

The mispronounced name and the system that misreads

There is something I have never told publicly. At an international tournament, I once mispronounced the name of a Vietnamese fighter in front of thousands of spectators, because the transliteration sheet I was handed spelled it differently from how his family said it. All that night, I was held up on social media as an example of carelessness.

I deleted nothing. I sat down, compared the name sheets one by one, and realized something more telling: every mispronunciation is a system trying to say something. Here, the system was saying it had no consistent standard for naming the very people it put on the mat. When a fighter has three spellings of his name in three different documents — one on the scoreboard, one on the certificate, one on the registration file — the fault is not with the reader. The fault is in how we keep people.

I misread one name, but the system has misread all of us.

Looking across the border

I work in Thailand, where Muay Thai has been packaged into an industry with rankings, contracts, and fighter databases updated fight by fight. Every fighter at the big stadiums has a record: fights, wins, losses, knockouts, even the most humiliating defeats. That transparency has not stripped Muay Thai of its tradition; it has made the tradition verifiable, and therefore protectable.

I am not saying Vietnam must copy Thailand. The martial cultures of the two countries differ, and I am the last person who would press a foreign mold onto an indigenous tradition. But there is a methodological lesson: the more honestly a martial art is recorded, the less it depends on the memory of those with the power to retell the story. And when the story no longer depends on a few witnesses, it becomes harder to distort.

The contrarian view: standardization may not save anything

The familiar response to problems like these is a call to standardize: build a ranking system, digitize the files, bring traditional martial arts into an international competition framework. It sounds entirely reasonable. But I am not sure that is the right answer, at least at this stage.

Experience from my own field shows something uncomfortable: disciplines that rush to standardize before they have a culture of record-keeping tend to produce beautiful but hollow rankings. They have score columns, athlete IDs, software — but the input data is still decided by gut feeling. The result is a system that looks modern while measuring very little, much the way distance covered and sprint counts can look good on a screen while saying nothing about the quality of a match.

Conversely, there is another risk few mention: hasty standardization can crush the very thing that makes traditional martial arts distinctive — the diversity of hundreds of schools, each with its own understanding of technique, its own philosophy of confrontation. Force them all into one mold, and we may lose what is most precious in exchange for a tidy but soulless scoreboard. And I have seen too many times sports bodies trade identity for recognition, only to find what they received was a piece of paper.

So where is the balance? I believe the issue is not whether to standardize, but the order of operations. The first task is not designing a competition framework but building a culture of honest record-keeping — writing down what actually happened, including the inconvenient parts. Standardization only means something when it records the truth. Otherwise, it is just a fresh coat of paint over the empty chairs.

What lies beneath the medal

I return to the two empty chairs in the judges' row. One might ask: what do two chairs have to do with the future of a martial tradition? The answer lies in the fact that, in sport, a gap is always data. A seat left unfilled on a judging panel, a weight class with no recorded result, a name not written correctly — all are signals the system emits when it lacks the resources or the will to examine itself.

We learn nothing from what goes right — only from what falls out of rhythm. A match that runs smoothly teaches us nothing. It is the blank scores, the mispronounced names, the unrecorded results that reveal where the system is weak. And the sad part is that those weaknesses often go unrecorded — because recording itself is the very thing that is missing.

Takeaway

If you ask me whether Vietnamese traditional martial arts need a data revolution, I will not answer directly. I will tell you about two empty chairs, about an "updating" line that is never updated, about three coaches and three different numbers for the same champion. The great lesson is not in the mistakes, but in what the system buried.

And perhaps the right question is not how to get Vietnamese traditional martial arts recognized by the world. The right question is: is this martial tradition truly seeing itself? For a system only begins to grow up on the day it sits down and rereads its own book — including the pages it deliberately left blank.