Counting Every Punch by Hand: Vietnam's Martial Arts Data Gap

On the night of the boxing finals at SEA Games 31 on home soil in Hanoi, I sat in the sixth row of the arena, a notebook in hand, my eyes fixed on the ring. The electronic board above showed figures for punches thrown and landed, but my hand kept its own tally. I counted every jab, every lateral step, every long breath of the fighter in the third round. When the bell closed the bout, the number of clean strikes I had counted drifted far from the board. The fault was not in the machines. At many of our events, scoring is still done more by feel than by data.

A discrepancy of 0.2 seconds taught me to trust my own eyes. It taught me at SEA Games 29 in Kuala Lumpur, when a small error in a report forced me to pull the piece and sit through twelve official tapes. Since then, every time I walk into an arena, I tell myself: if a 200-metre race can be misread because of a single figure, how much more will a punch — something that unfolds in about a tenth of a second — be missed?

In Vietnam, martial arts carry a tradition few sports can match, yet they remain among the most data-poor fields. Vovinam was born in 2026 under the late master Nguyen Loc, tied to a spirit of Vietnamese self-reliance. Wrestling has long been the soul of village festivals, appearing in spring celebrations across the northern delta. Then came boxing, taekwondo, karate, pencak silat, wrestling and judo — the disciplines that bring medals to Vietnam's delegation at every SEA Games. According to the organisers' statistics for SEA Games 31 in Hanoi in 2026, the host nation won 205 gold medals and topped the table, with combat sports contributing a significant share. More recently, the first professional mixed martial arts promotions, such as LION Championship, have opened a stage for young fighters.

And yet, whenever I need to analyse a bout, I find almost nothing but the judges' scorecards, a few edited clips and a great deal of impressionistic commentary. There is no system for logging strikes in real time, no file tracking injuries or a fighter's weight cut. In football, the world has data companies recording thousands of events per match; on the ring, everything is left to the referee's memory. What is worrying is not that we lack the machines, but that we have grown used to not needing the numbers.

When a bout ends in a close decision, fans argue, fighters feel wronged, and no one has enough data to prove anything. Based on my experience of following matches, this is the biggest gap between martial arts and sports that have already been digitised.

Walk through a bout with the eyes of someone who counts by hand. Technically, we have no metric equivalent to strikes landed per minute or accuracy rates used in international events. To assess a stylistic matchup, we are forced to rewatch the footage and draw our own grid. I once did that for eight female fighters, and found that a high volume of strikes is not necessarily an advantage — much as a possession rate can deceive anyone. A fighter who throws two hundred missed punches is worth less than one who lands just three at the right moment.

On condition, Vietnamese fighters often enter a competition cycle with no one tracking their age curve or wear. The weight cut happens in silence, sometimes only in the final days before the scale. The body is a blackboard the coach never finishes reading.

Organisationally, events remain fragmented, each with its own rules and scoring. In business terms, fighter pay is mostly low and tied to one-off contracts. On health, the risk of brain injury and cases of uncontrolled weight cutting remain a dark zone never properly recorded. In media, we are easily swept up by overhyped matchups, while the real value lies in the quality of the strikes, not the volume of the crowd.

I counted Iceland's every move, and suddenly saw a whole world. That world is not in glossy numbers, but in people's willingness to spend effort looking closely at what they are watching.

But here I must argue against myself. More data is not automatically better. I have seen analysts carry spreadsheets into the locker room, turn a bout into an equation, and forget that behind every metric is a person who is afraid, proud, hurting. Data that enters the locker room without understanding its rhythm only produces conclusions cut off from reality.

Precisely because data is missing, Vietnamese martial arts are judged by glamorous stories rather than real ability. A fighter celebrated after a few viral clips may lack the conditioning to last three rounds. Conversely, a quietly accumulating boxer is remembered by no one, because there is no number to speak of him.

Argument is the path I use to find what I have not yet thought. Perhaps Vietnamese martial arts do not need a technology revolution, but a generation willing to sit down, count every punch by hand, and dare to say aloud even what they counted wrong. My job is to find the piece the whole stadium forgot — and in the ring, those pieces are still scattered, waiting for someone to bend down and pick them up.