The Wrong Ruler of Vietnamese Martial Arts

In the press room of a martial arts event in Ho Chi Minh City, a colleague leaned over and asked me: "What is the win rate of this taekwondo poomsae athlete?" It took me a few seconds to understand the question. That athlete competes against no one. She steps onto the mat, performs her form, and a panel of judges scores difficulty and accuracy. No opponent, no rounds, no scoreline. Yet for years, the way we talk about people like her has revolved around "win", "loss" and "form". The ruler is placed against the wrong subject, and the measurement becomes meaningless. I started noting these mismatched moments at the end of 2026, when I was a 17-year-old writer mocked for daring to analyse tactics. People laughed at the first article, but nobody could laugh at the match it described.

Vietnamese martial arts consists of two families that require two separate sets of tools. The first is performance and conventional combat: taekwondo poomsae, karate kata, wushu taolu, vovinam forms. There, what is measured is difficulty score, execution score and technical deductions. The second is direct combat: boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing, MMA, wrestling. There, the 10-9 scorecard per round, the count of effective strikes and the ability to absorb impact are the working language.

The confusion between the two appears at almost every stage. A Muay Thai fighter such as Nguyen Tran Duy Nhat, a boxer such as Truong Dinh Hoang and a taekwondo poomsae athlete such as Chau Tuyet Van are placed side by side in the same headline, the same "achievements" table, as if they competed in one sport. Across five years of following events from training halls to arenas, I have seen this shorthand seep into serious documents: tournament regulations, federation statements, and the medal table of the National Sports Festival, where everything is added up into a single number.

A forms athlete has no opponent, so a "win rate" does not technically exist for them. What can genuinely be measured is their average score across competitions, their consistency between qualifiers and finals, the number of deductions for lost balance, and the difficulty of the routine they dare to register. When a newspaper writes "defeat" for a form that placed second, it erases that entire data set and replaces it with vocabulary that does not belong to the discipline.

Conversely, judging a puncher by the criterion of "beauty" is equally wrong. In boxing or Muay Thai, what decides is the count of effective strikes, defensive capability, and the price paid after every round. A points win can leave more damage than a points loss. This is why I always prepare two separate notebooks before every event: one for the technical-scoring group, one for the combat-scoring group. The first tracks deductions and difficulty; the second tracks rhythm, distance and impact. Pouring both into one spreadsheet is the fastest way to produce an analysis that is wrong while looking highly professional.

Risk in the performance group lies in repeated volume. A form is practised thousands of times a month, loading the ankle, the knee and the lower back. Injuries here arrive slowly, accumulate, and are often dismissed as minor because no one collides with anyone. Risk in the combat group lies in the head and in body weight. The number of strikes absorbed, the count of knockdowns, the history of being stopped, and the degree of dehydration from weight cutting are what must be recorded first.

As a reporter, I need at least three data points to speak about a fighter's safety: the weight at the official weigh-in, the rehydration window, and any medical suspension history. At many domestic events, all three go unpublished. When there is no data, I write only one sentence: this needs further verification. It is the sentence I use most, and I am not ashamed of it.

When a system counts only what sells, it stops counting what needs protecting. Each discipline has its own federation, its own rulebook, its own ranking method. But when the National Sports Festival comes around, everything is gathered into a single medal table. That aggregation is convenient for media and sponsors, yet it converts a difference in nature into a difference in medal quantity. A forms medal and a boxing medal become two identical cells in a spreadsheet. Deeper still, martial arts data in Vietnam is largely collected to serve sponsorship and publicity, not to serve the safety of the people who train.

The common assumption is that Vietnamese martial arts needs to "professionalise" by importing international metrics: strikes landed, takedown success rate, finish rate. That view ignores a detail about origins: those metrics were designed first for television graphics and betting markets, and only afterwards for athletes. Copying the electronic scoreboard without copying the safety infrastructure delivers the appearance of professionalism alongside a zero in protection.

A second misunderstanding: that performance martial arts is a "lower tier" of combat. It is not below, it is beside. A difficulty score is no less demanding than a 10-9 round; it is simply demanding in a different way. The empty-stand season of 2026 taught me this most clearly. With no spectators, no cheering, the events continued in their own manner, and I still had to find the right ruler for each group. The stands were empty, but I could still hear the pulse of an entire collective.

The signals I will track from here are not medals. First, whether any federation publishes official weigh-in data and medical suspensions on a regular basis. Second, whether newsrooms will separate the two vocabularies, so a form is no longer called a "loss" and a puncher is no longer graded on "beauty". Third, whether the medal table will specify the discipline group beside each medal.

Some defeats are not in the scoreline, but in their eyes as they leave the mat. I write from there.