Vietnam's Lanes and the Data Gap Nobody Counts

At five in the morning, the pool in Nha Trang holds nothing but the sound of water against the tiles. I sit in the top row, a stopwatch in my left hand, a notebook with a frayed edge in my right. A fourteen-year-old boy is swimming the 200m individual medley. No electronic board, no touchpad sensor, no one but me counting his strokes. When he touches the wall, I hold a number that no results sheet will ever record. That moment made one thing clear to me: the biggest problem in Vietnamese swimming is not under the water. It lies in everything we refuse to write down.

When I hear the stands roar, I know I am writing with sweat, not only with ink. But in swimming, the stands rarely roar loudly enough to drown out the truth that most of our data evaporates right after every touch of the wall.

This is what I have observed across years of covering domestic meets. A national championship can run for four days, with hundreds of swims, yet the figures we keep are usually just finishing times and placings. No split sheets, no stroke-rate data, no underwater time after the start, no turn speed. Everything an international coach treats as the minimum for judging a swimmer becomes, in our country, a "luxury" data point.

I once sat beside a foreign coach during a youth-team training session. He opened his laptop and projected a table packed with split figures for every athlete. Then he turned to me and asked: "Where is your data?" I had nothing to offer. A whole session, a whole training cycle, drifted by without leaving a single trace that could be analysed.

Pressing data does not lie, but it does whisper the name of a star still asleep. Swimming works the same way. A swimmer may be slower than a rival over the first 50m, yet anyone who bothers to log stroke count and turn times will see that he is saving energy for the last 50m. Without data, that star remains forever a name sitting fourth on the scoreboard.

We keep hearing that Vietnamese swimming lacks talent. I do not believe it. What we lack is the ability to see talent before it shines. Nguyen Thi Anh Vien was once spotted because a coach took the trouble to watch a small girl swim in the middle of a crowd. Nguyen Huy Hoang also rose step by step from lanes few people noticed. But how many other children, with the same raw qualities, were passed over simply because nobody could count their strokes?

In other words, we run a swimming culture built on memory and instinct, while the world runs on data. A country may lack an Olympic-standard pool, but it cannot afford to lack a decent record-keeping system. A pool can be built in a few years; a data culture has to be built over decades.

I have personally held the stopwatch for hundreds of swims like this. Each time, I record three things: finishing time, stroke count per 50m, and the gap between turns. Just three figures, yet they are enough to tell a story the scoreboard cannot. A swimmer who increases his stroke count in the final 50m is fading; one who holds his stroke count steady and still finishes faster is genuinely improving.

I once tried to compare the data from a domestic youth meet with the public data from a regional youth meet. On the other side, every swim came with split sheets, average speed for each 50m, even heart-rate charts for the athletes. On our side, the only thing I could find was a photo of a scoreboard with blurred numbers. That gap is not about talent. It is about habit.

Every sport is its own universe, and I am lucky to be a traveller between those orbits. But in the universe of swimming, the light of data is being pulled into a black hole named "nobody does it".

The counter-intuitive part is this: the more money we pour into chasing medals, the more easily we forget to keep records. An Olympic berth is celebrated, but the process that leads there is treated as backstage business, not worth preserving. Yet that process is exactly what can be replicated.

Some will say: what use is data when we still have no world medal? That question is backwards. Without data there is no medal, not the other way around. Every strong swimming nation on earth began with handwritten notebooks, long before it had electronic boards.

And here is the biggest blind spot: we tend to measure by the final result, while the world measures by trend. A swimmer who places eighth but has a steeper improvement curve than the one who places third is the better investment. But to see that curve, you need data gathered over months and years. Without it, every judgement is just a guess.

I am not writing this to complain. I am writing to propose something very small: at every swim meet, assign one person whose only job is to take notes. No expensive technology is needed, just a stopwatch and a notebook. A year later, we will have something money cannot buy: the memory of the lanes.

That fourteen-year-old boy in Nha Trang, I still keep the sheet with his figures. One day, if he appears on an electronic board at a big arena, I will be the first to say: I saw it long ago, it is just that nobody would look alongside me.