Vietnamese Traditional Martial Arts and the Data Gap Behind Every Medal

Vietnamese Traditional Martial Arts and the Data Gap Behind Every Medal On a mat in a southern arena, a martial artist completed his form with the trung tran stance, his breathing still even, the hem of his tunic not yet straightened. Three judges put pen to paper. The scores appeared on the electronic board: 9.15 – 9.25 – 9.35. That two-tenths spread decided which gold medal changed hands, and decided the fate of a school twelve years in the making. When the organisers were asked why the same form, the same criteria and the same panel had produced three results so far apart, the only answer available was: judges feel things differently. No detailed record by individual sub-criterion. No stored data file. Not one line of score breakdown for anyone later to check. Three paper slips, and that was the end of it. The scene repeats often enough that it is no longer an accident. It is the symptom of a system that generates a great deal of information and then erases it the moment the applause stops. Context: a large competition system, a thin data file Vietnamese traditional martial arts carry a depth recorded across many centuries, tied to centres such as Binh Dinh and Tay Son, alongside hundreds of schools and training halls still active nationwide. The traditional martial art of Binh Dinh was recognised as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2026, opening a period in which the discipline was viewed both as heritage and organised as a high-performance sport. The Vietnam Traditional Martial Arts Federation was established in the early 1990s. Several veteran masters are tied to the period when the discipline entered the official competition system, among them master Nguyen Van Chieu and master Mai Van Mau. Since then the federation has held national championships at fairly regular intervals and placed the discipline on the official programme of the National Sports Festival. The competition structure splits into two main branches: quyen, the performance of set forms by school and by age group, and doi khang, sparring divided by weight class, with protective gear and its own competition rules. Seen from outside, this is a complete system: a federation, statutes, a refereeing panel, a scoring scale, prizes, a grading structure. Seen from inside, the data file is close to empty. There is no national database of forms by school. There is no standardised video library for each form, each grade, each age group. There is no score breakdown published after each judging pass. There is no technical difficulty index quantified by number of movements, complexity of transitions, stance amplitude or execution time. The consequence is not that a particular tournament was judged wrongly. The consequence is that at every tournament, a large volume of valuable information is created and then erased. Nobody extracts a single information point. Nobody distils a single core viewpoint to feed into the next season's judging guidance. This season's panel inherits nothing from last season's panel beyond the personal experience of a few people, and that experience disappears when they leave the chair. Where the real problem sits The current form-judging criteria usually revolve around four groups: technical accuracy, difficulty, rhythm and spirit, and originality of the form. That grouping is not wrong. The problem is that the criteria groups exist only as verbal descriptions, with no quantitative scale attached and no published weighting. Take difficulty. In artistic gymnastics, difficulty is coded into letter symbols tied to specific point values; an athlete knows exactly what a double somersault is worth before stepping onto the mat. In diving, the degree-of-difficulty coefficient is published before the event, and judges simply multiply it by the execution score. In taekwondo poomsae, the scoring system clearly separates accuracy and presentation, each with its own scale, both published. In Vietnamese traditional martial arts, difficulty is described in one sentence: this form is relatively hard. That sentence cannot be cross-checked, cannot be argued with, and cannot be transferred to another judge. It depends entirely on whether the judge has seen the form, whether the judge has practised it, and which school the judge belongs to. So when three judges give three different scores, there is no mechanism to trace why. One judge rates the rhythm highly but deducts for difficulty; another does the reverse. Both are consistent with their own understanding, and neither is wrong to a degree that would let a training hall win an appeal, because the criteria are not tight enough to prove anyone wrong. I once spent two years following tournaments in three regions, recording published scores and comparing them with the competition videos that were posted. The rate of successful appeals was close to zero. That is usually read as a sign of a stable judging culture. That reading ignores another possibility: appeals fail because the records on which an appeal would rest are too thin. To prove a judge scored wrongly, a training hall must point to one specific brick in a wall where no brick has been numbered. The issue goes beyond any single tournament. Vietnamese traditional martial arts are in transition, wanting to preserve their heritage character while standing firm inside the high-performance sports system. Those two goals do not reconcile automatically. Heritage lives on oral transmission between teacher and student, on difference between schools, on things that cannot be written into standards. High performance lives on standards, on data, on the ability to compare athletes from different provinces. One side needs blur, the other needs clear edges. Without a full analytical framework, both sides lose. The heritage side gradually loses its grounds for asserting value to sports administrators, because no data shows that an old form is harder or more distinctive than a newly composed one. The high-performance side loses the ability to raise the bar, because it does not know where the current bar sits. A complete analytical framework for forms in Vietnamese traditional martial arts needs at least four data layers. The first is the form record: name, school, number of movements, movement path across the mat, standard duration, list of compulsory technical movements. The second is a difficulty index: quantifying each movement by technique group, plus a transition coefficient and a balance coefficient. The third is execution data: reference video, timing of each segment, deviation from the reference path. The fourth is judging data: scores for each criteria group published per judge, with notes on why points were deducted. Those four layers do not demand advanced technology. A shared spreadsheet, a fixed camera, and a rule requiring publication are enough to begin. What is missing here is not resources. What is missing is a decision, and a person accountable for that decision. The contrarian angle: heritage defenders are locking themselves in The most common reaction when data standardisation comes up in traditional martial arts is this: it will kill the soul of the art. The argument sounds reasonable, and I have heard it often enough to believe the people saying it are entirely sincere. But it rests on a false assumption, that data and the soul of the art are mutually exclusive. Reality usually runs the other way. In football, recording almost every pass over the past twenty years has not stripped the improvisation out of a beautiful combination. It has only let people tell improvisation apart from a fantasy painted on after the final whistle. In boxing, counting every punch does not diminish the beauty of a counter; it lets that beauty be pointed to rather than proclaimed. What kills the soul of a martial art is indifference, not record-keeping. A form with no file, no video and no successor disappears within two generations. A form that is recorded, with its movements numbered and filmed from three angles, may still fade spiritually, but at least those who come later have grounds to restore it. Keep what can be kept first; the soul can be accounted for afterwards. The reverse must be said too, for fairness. A cult of data is growing in Vietnamese sport, and it is no less dangerous. Data does not lie, but the people collecting it can lie by choosing what to measure. An index set designed to favour schools with many training halls, with the resources to film and edit, with people to lobby for policy, will look perfectly objective while functioning as a medal-distribution tool. If Vietnamese traditional martial arts standardise without anyone supervising how the indices are defined, the outcome will be worse than today. Today the unfairness is visible, so it can still be corrected. Later, the unfairness will be written in numerical format, with charts and reports, and will become technically beyond dispute. A closing thought I once simulated the roar of the crowd for an empty stadium, and found that the loudest applause came from the numbers. That holds true for football, and it will hold true for Vietnamese traditional martial arts too, only differently and more slowly. The organisers of traditional martial arts tournaments do not need to wait for a grand reform. They can start with something small: require every judge to publish scores by individual sub-criterion immediately after judging, and store it all in a shared file. When data begins to push back, tactics finally speak. In this case, the tactics are simply how a martial tradition decides it wants to exist over the next fifty years. A contract is never wrong; only the person holding the pen can lie to himself. Score slips are no different.