Vietnamese Martial Arts and the Data Gap: When the Pulse Goes Unrecorded

A weekend evening at the Khanh Hoa Provincial Sports Arena. The youth sanda tournament had just closed its third round. The winning fighter sat in the corner of the mat, pulling off his gloves, breathing hard with every beat. Mr. Hung, a coach from a local martial arts school, turned to me and asked: “Do you know how many bouts that kid has won?” I opened the lined notebook in my jacket pocket. The page had the score, the time, the number of rounds. Only the record column I had to leave blank. Nobody in the arena that night could say for sure. The organizers kept no head-to-head files, the referees kept no detailed minutes, and the name that had just stepped off the mat would dissolve into the night like hundreds of other names in the season.

I stayed until the lights above the mat went out. In the silence after the final bell, I heard something familiar: the pulse was still there, it was just that nobody was writing it down. Every season has its own pulse; you only have to be willing to listen. But once you have listened, where do you write it?

Vietnamese martial arts is a garden with many doors, and each door opens onto a different way of counting. One door belongs to traditional martial arts, where practitioners perform forms and are scored on difficulty, precision and spirit. There is no win-or-lose in the combat sense; there are points, rankings and applause. Another door belongs to sanda, a combat discipline that has appeared at the SEA Games, where victory is decided by strikes and judges' points. Another door belongs to boxing, kickboxing, muay and the combat variants sprouting in ordinary gyms. And one more door belongs to grassroots MMA, where small events are held in provincial arenas and gather fighters who train while working side jobs.

What stands out: those doors are often lumped together under the single word martial arts in news reports, and once lumped together, nobody can analyze anything. A forms champion and a sanda fighter are both called a Vietnamese martial artist, yet they are measured with two different rulers. The record table of one discipline cannot be compared with another. A medal from one event cannot be converted into another. When different logics are mixed into one headline, readers are left with only a vague feeling: Vietnamese martial arts is growing.

That feeling is not wrong, but it helps no one improve. Over many years following fight venues from north to south, I have realized the problem is not talent. The problem is that we have no shared notebook.

The core of the story is that three different ways of measuring have been mixed together, and that mixing has erased the traces of an entire generation of fighters.

Forms disciplines score on difficulty and quality of performance. A form is given a 9.2 or a 9.5, and ranking is based on total points. There is no concept of winning by knockout, no combat weight class, no head-to-head record. Combat disciplines work the opposite way: by win, loss, draw; by weight class; by referees' minutes and by weigh-ins before the bout. These two systems need two entirely different kinds of data. When we call both of them martial arts records, we blur the most important thing on each side.

Then comes the question of safety. In combat sports, weight class and the number on the scale are not formalities. A fighter who cuts weight the wrong way can collapse before the bout even begins. In martial arts systems with tight organization, every weigh-in is recorded, every injury case has a file, every long layoff is marked. Here, most of those numbers exist only in coaches' memories and in a few hastily taken photos. Without weigh-in data, we cannot screen for risk. Without injury records, we cannot know whether a fighter has truly recovered.

This is where I think of St. Petersburg. In 2026, at the age of 53, I mispronounced a player's name three times on live broadcast, and social media turned on me. I did not argue back. That night I rewatched the footage, wrote phonetic notes for the names of all 23 players on both teams, and practiced pronunciation until morning. St. Petersburg taught me that a stumble is the fastest way to learn to walk. It also taught me something else: if I do not write it down myself, no one will write it down for me. A mispronounced name can be corrected. A record that is never written is lost forever.

A decent record-keeping system for martial arts does not need to be complicated. It only needs to answer a few basic questions: how many bouts has this fighter had, what were the wins and losses, in which weight class; when was the most recent appearance and what was the result; how far has this fighter cut weight before, and are there injury signs worth monitoring. It sounds simple, yet in most of our grassroots events, no one can answer a single one of them fully.

In combat disciplines, data is also the memory of the art. Without it, every generation must start learning from scratch. A coach in Nha Trang cannot know where his student stands against the whole country, because there is no ruler to measure by. A fighter who wins five bouts in a row remains unknown, because those five bouts are recorded nowhere but in his own notebook. And when he retires, that notebook closes with him.

A martial arts scene without a shared notebook means each star shines only in the memory of a few people, then fades when those people forget.

Head-to-head history is what feeds interest. In football, people remember a fixture because they know who won last time, by how much, in which minute. In martial arts, that memory barely exists. A fighter can meet the exact same opponent again after two years, and the crowd sitting below the mat has no idea the two have ever faced each other. Without head-to-head history, every bout is a start from zero, and an art that lives on rematches is erasing its own most precious material.

Even weight classes are not consistent across events. The same fighter can be placed in the 60 kg division at one event and the 61 kg division at another, which makes comparing records meaningless. A small difference in the number, but the consequence is large: no one can compare two fighters fairly.

The operating chain of martial arts resembles that of football, except that the mesh is looser. Upstream are the martial arts schools and gyms, where talent is selected and nurtured. Midstream are the events and federations, where competition, ranking and medals are handled. Downstream are audiences, media and the market, where a fighter becomes a valuable name. In football, those meshes are connected by a relatively unified data system. In Vietnamese martial arts, each mesh counts in its own way, and most of the numbers never pass through to the next mesh.

I witnessed this during the 2026 Covid season, when the 19/8 stadium in Nha Trang was empty and the club I follow lost its sponsor. Back then I learned a principle: if the pen can hurt someone, put it down. That principle applies to data too. Writing about a fighter who lost, about a failed weight cut, about an injury, must be done carefully, with context, with consent, and never to turn it into a joke. But careful is not the same as not writing. Complete silence before important numbers is also a way of abandoning people.

There is a layer of fighters I always want to give a page to: those who never reach the top podium, who never appear in the media, yet still train every morning. In Khanh Hoa, I know small martial arts schools tucked in alleys, opening at five in the morning, teaching neighborhood children before they go to school. Those children have no files, no record tables, no one watching them. But it is precisely there that the seed of the art is kept. The silent star of Nha Trang never goes out, but if no one writes it down, that light becomes only the memory of a few old people.

From the outside, the story is usually told in one direction: Vietnamese martial arts is rising. Medals at regional arenas, movements blooming in big cities, gyms opening in every neighborhood, grassroots events drawing large crowds. It sounds right. But that telling hides one point: most of the rising happens at the visible layer, while the submerged layer, where data is kept, where fighters' health is protected, where generations are connected, remains empty.

There is another misunderstanding, this time from the skeptics. They look at the lack of record tables, the lack of data, the lack of files, and conclude that our martial arts is weak. That conclusion is wrong because it places the cause in the wrong spot. What is weak is not the fighters; what is weak is the record-keeping infrastructure around them. A good fighter can still be unknown if no one writes down his wins. A talented generation can still vanish if there is no notebook to hold them.

In football, I once saw the opposite: a young player only had to run 1.2 km more per match than the previous season for his story to be told, because the numbers existed. Martial arts lacks exactly that 1.2 km, a unit of measure concrete enough for people to believe, and regular enough for people to compare.

If I were asked for one thing for next season, I would not ask for more prizes or more broadcast time. I would ask for a shared notebook: where every bout is recorded with an absolute date, every weigh-in is kept with a number and a unit, every fighter has a head-to-head file solid enough for those who come later to look up. No glory, no clickbait. Just recording, steadily and truthfully.

I write slowly because I want to remember for a long time, like someone keeping the rhythm for the whole field. With martial arts, perhaps it is time for the whole scene to keep the rhythm together, starting from a page left blank.