Asiad 20, September 29: Sepak Takraw Takes Gold, Vietnamese Athletics Hits the Continental Ceiling

The hollow crack of a rattan ball against a foot echoed through the sealed arena. From a corner of the stands, I heard teammates of the Vietnamese sepak takraw women shouting in Vietnamese, shattering the solemn midday air of an Asian Games session. A few hundred meters away, the 400m track was far quieter. No cheers. No applause. Only the sound of footsteps hammering the synthetic surface, then fading after the finish line.

September 29 at Asiad 20 in Japan was a two-toned picture. On one side, a convincing sepak takraw gold medal for Vietnam, sealed with set wins of 15-8 and 15-4 over the Philippines. On the other, the silence of athletics: Dương Thị Thảo finished 6th in the women's high jump, the women's 4x400m relay placed 5th, and the men's 4x400m relay finished last. Three results. Not a single medal.

This is the 20th Asian Games, held in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. For the Vietnamese delegation, the target was explicit: four gold medals. By the end of September 29, the delegation had 2 golds, 1 silver and 17 bronzes, enough to hold a modest place inside the top 20 but not enough to feel safe.

I had followed the delegation's matches from the opening days. The mood in the athletes' village varies wildly by sport. Sepak takraw is a discipline where Vietnam has a long rivalry with the Philippines, especially at the SEA Games, but on a continental stage the test is genuinely hotter. The September 29 match unfolded exactly as the coaching staff hoped. There was no great drama, but there was a cold efficiency worth respecting.

The same day, the delegation also competed in shooting (men's 25m rapid fire pistol), volleyball, beach volleyball and kurash. But athletics was the discipline I was waiting for most, because it is the sport that has carried so much expectation for Vietnam, and the one where the gap between the regional and continental stage shows most clearly.

I remember an evening in 2026, the first time I sat in a commentary box for the U19 Vietnam vs U19 Guam match at Lạch Tray Stadium. A producer asked me point-blank: "What does a girl know about tactics?" I did not argue. I just prepared quietly. That first headset felt heavier than I expected, but my voice felt heavier still. By the end of the first half, I had mispronounced Guam's No. 7 three times. That night I went home, downloaded all twelve qualifier recordings, and watched until 3 a.m. Since then, in every article, I ask "Why" before I ask "Who won."

The "Why" for Vietnamese athletics at Asiad 20 has an answer that does not sit on the track.

Looking at the relay squads, I saw something painfully familiar. The women's 4x400m lineup included Nguyễn Thị Ngọc, Quách Thị Lan and Nguyễn Thị Hằng. The men's included Tạ Ngọc Tưởng and Trần Nhật Hoàng. All were summed up in one word: veterans. Not "young talents." Not "the next generation." Just veterans.

The key point sits here: Vietnam's athletics results at Asiad 20 are not a sudden failure, but the inevitable output of a system that has run out of depth to rely on. When a delegation bets on athletes past their peak while no successor class appears on the roster, the absence of medals is no longer a problem of one competition day. It is a problem of a whole cycle.

What is more telling is that the delegation leadership itself admitted this. In the list of sports still hoped to deliver gold on the remaining days, athletics does not appear. Only boxing, shooting and sepak takraw do. When a federation removes its own sport from the medal plan, that is a stronger message than any defeat on the track.

Quách Thị Lan was once the pride of Vietnamese athletics in the 400m and 400m hurdles. She brought home precious medals at SEA Games. But at the age of a veteran, the fact that she still had to be on the women's 4x400m squad at an Asian Games shows one thing: nobody was ready to replace her. That is not her fault. It is the fault of a youth development system that has not produced a new wave.

This story is not new. But each time it repeats, it hurts more.

On pure performance terms, Vietnam's athletics results at Asiad 20 fall in the band of "makes finals, cannot fight for medals." The women's relay finished 5th in a field where continental powers like Japan, India, Bahrain and China routinely touch the podium. The men's relay finished last in the final, meaning they qualified but were the weakest qualifier in the final. Dương Thị Thảo finished 6th in the women's high jump. None of them had times or heights recorded in the bulletin. That makes any quantitative comparison impossible.

I will say it plainly: a report on a 4x400m relay final without any race times is an incomplete report. As a working journalist, I understand that a dedicated athletics correspondent is not always on site. But the absence of any number means we cannot know the real gap between Vietnam and the continental leaders in seconds. Five seconds? Fifteen? Twenty? Nobody can answer. And when there are no numbers, the story slides into emotion instead of analysis.

The gap between regional and continental athletics is a wound that individual effort can never close. At the SEA Games, a 400m runner clocking 52 seconds can win a medal. At the Asian Games, the same mark may only be enough to make a final and finish last. This does not mean Vietnamese athletes are not trying. It means the whole baseline of a system must be raised, from talent identification, nutrition and sports medicine to the organization of genuinely competitive domestic meets.

But there is a paradox I want to raise, and it may be uncomfortable. When Vietnam sets a target of four golds and reaches half with the Games nearly over, the pressure shifts onto sports like sepak takraw, shooting and boxing. These are disciplines that can deliver medals faster, cheaper and with less competition than athletics. Strategically, that makes perfect sense. In the long run, though, if we keep draining investment from athletics to pour it into the "easier medal" sports, the gap will only grow. Athletics is the foundation sport. It is not just running fast and jumping high. It is a measure of the physical health of an entire sporting nation.

I ask myself: when no athletics athlete is named on the medal target list, does anyone in the leadership sit down and ask "Why?", or do we simply nod and move to the next sport?

There is something interesting in this very bulletin: the women's 4x400m relay finished 5th while the men's finished last. This is a familiar paradox in Asian athletics. In the women's event, the field is usually thinner, so a mid-tier Vietnamese squad can slip into the top five. In the men's event, where nations like Japan, India, Bahrain and China all field strong, deep relay teams, Vietnam is pushed to the bottom. This is not progress for the women's squad. It is a difference in competitive depth between two fields.

And that leads me to a thought about how we frame results. When a team finishes 5th, reporters often call it an "encouraging performance." When a team finishes last, we call it a "failure." But both are teams that qualified for the final, something not every nation manages. The difference between 5th and 8th is sometimes a few seconds, or even a single mishap during the baton exchange. Yet in coverage, 5th and 8th are two entirely different stories. That is the unfairness of media, and I am part of it. I too have written "encouraging performance" lines that I did not quite believe.

So what is truly worrying here? Not the absence of medals. Rather, it is that an Asian Games has come and gone, and Vietnamese athletics has no young face to talk about. I am not talking about winning medals at 18 or 19, which is beyond most sporting nations. I am talking about a new name appearing on the entry list, someone who in the next Asian Games cycle we might hope will go further. But in the September 29 bulletin, I only see veterans.

If you have followed me long enough, you know I hold one stubborn belief: stars are not born in finals, but in matches nobody watches. A young 400m runner is discovered when they run at a national championship with no crowd, no television and no prize money. In places no one notices, I find what the whole world will later talk about. If we only look at Asian Games results, we only see the tip of the iceberg. And the submerged part, where young athletes train every day with no one watching, is what decides the next cycle.

Sepak takraw delivered the gold. That is good news, and I do not want to diminish it. But if we celebrate that gold by contrasting it with athletics' failure, we miss the chance to learn from both. Sepak takraw succeeds because it sits inside a long-term investment plan. Athletics fails because it does not, or because the plan was abandoned long ago.

September 29 at Asiad 20 is not the worst day in Vietnamese sport. With 2 golds, the delegation can still reach its four-gold target if sepak takraw, shooting and boxing perform as expected. But that is exactly the issue: when medal targets depend on a narrow set of sports, the concentration risk is enormous. If one of those three slips, the whole target can collapse. This is not how you build a sustainable sporting nation. It is how you optimize short-term results.

Deeper down, I worry that the system cannot see its own problem. When an internal bulletin explicitly notes "athletics has no medal," yet the gold-hope list excludes athletics, what message does that send to young athletes? That their sport does not matter. That their path has no future. That they should switch to another discipline. That is a damaging message, and it will haunt Vietnamese athletics for many cycles.

I sit here in Hai Phong, writing these lines as the stadium in Nagoya has switched off its lights. Out there, perhaps a 16-year-old girl or boy is running on an empty track, wondering whether their future lies on the continental stage. With no cheers around, I hear my own applause more clearly. And if someone out there is listening, I want them to know this: the value of an athlete is not measured by medal counts at one Asian Games. It is measured by whether they keep running, after everyone has stopped cheering.

Vietnamese athletics won no medal at Asiad 20. But the question is not "How do we win a medal next time?" It is "Are we ready to build a system that can produce medals over the next ten years?" That is a question no single bulletin can answer. But it is the only question worth asking.