Vietnamese Swimming After the Ánh Viên Era: Silences the Clock Cannot Measure

The sound of water breaking against the pool wall is dry and hard, unlike anything else I have heard in more than fourteen years standing at the edge of running tracks. It was the end of a 1500m freestyle heat, and the youngest swimmer in the lane stood gasping, shoulders shaking, eyes fixed on the surface as if there were still one more lap to swim. No cheer was loud enough to drown out that breathing. I am used to standing beside the piste waiting for a track athlete to collapse past the finish line. Only when I set foot on a pool deck did I understand that water has its own silence. On the track, silence arrives after the race. In water, silence is the condition that lets the race exist — the swimmer hears nothing but their own breathing. There are races that are not measured by a clock, but by the silence between two breaths. In 2026, when world sport froze, I sat on Long Bien Bridge at five in the morning to record the footsteps of Nguyen Van Lai, the SEA Games 3000m steeplechase champion. That podcast taught me something I later carried intact to the pool: the sound of endurance is not in the victory shout, but in the brutally steady breathing of a person trying to keep themselves from breaking apart. The 1500m swim and the 3000m steeplechase share the same curse: loneliness. The difference is that the runner is lonely in full view of the stands, while the swimmer is lonely even when the stands are packed. That is why I began to look at Vietnamese swimming through the eyes of a track writer. And why I believe the biggest story in Vietnamese sport this major-event cycle is not a medal, but the gap behind it. ONE STAR SHINES, AND THE SHADOW RUNS LONG For nearly a decade, Vietnamese swimming was almost synonymous with a single name: Nguyen Thi Anh Vien. The girl from Can Tho, born in 2026, appeared as a teenager and turned the SEA Games into her personal arena, collecting gold medals in numbers that forced people to re-check the tables to remember them all. At her peak she was the pride of an entire sporting nation, and also a shield covering many problems nobody wanted to name. When that radiance dimmed — as every sporting star eventually must — Vietnamese swimming faced a question that came with no applause: apart from her, what do we have? The answer has names. Nguyen Huy Hoang, born in 2026 in Quang Binh, made history as the first Vietnamese swimmer to win a medal at an Asian Games. Tran Hung Nguyen, the next generation, reached the Olympic stage. Pham Thanh Bao, Vo Thi My Tien — names raised at SEA Games press conferences as the hope of a coming class. The list is not empty. Its depth, however, is thin. I once sat in a press room in Kuala Lumpur in 2026, when the SEA Games was still a stage where Vietnamese believed they could win on individual skill alone. Years later, looking back, I see a pattern repeating: whenever Vietnam produces a star, the whole system learns to live off that star. When the star sets, the system stumbles. SEA Games 31, hosted in Hanoi in 2026, was one of the rare occasions when a domestic pool became the centre of an entire Games, with packed stands and medals counted day by day. It was a beautiful moment. But a home Games does not build a foundation. It only exposes how thin the foundation is. READING SWIMMING THE WAY YOU READ A DISTANCE RACE Start with technique, because technique is where the truth surfaces first. In distance swimming, four things decide the outcome: the start and the underwater glide, turn technique, stroke rate, and distance per stroke — how far the body travels in one arm cycle. Swim a 1500m in about fifteen minutes and you must hold roughly thirty seconds per 50m lap; the cost of losing half a second on every turn is almost the entire gap to the continental front pack. At Olympic level, nobody wins with a beautiful stroke. They win by not dropping one percent on each turn. That is why turn technique and the underwater dolphin phase — things Vietnamese spectators barely see because they happen below the surface — are where leading nations invest most. In Japan, where I was born, a middle-schooler can spend months with a coach adjusting the angle of the wrist on every turn. In Vietnam, many young swimmers learn that technique from online videos, with nobody standing at the pool to correct them by a centimetre. Put another way, the problem with Vietnamese swimming is not spirit. It is knowledge infrastructure. When I compare the physiology of 1500m swimmers with 800m runners and 3000m steeplechasers, I am always struck by how similar their aerobic thresholds are. Both depend on sustaining power near the lactate threshold for a long time, and both are determined by foundations built in adolescence. An athlete can compensate for a weak base with willpower for one season. Nobody compensates for it over ten years. That is the crux: Vietnamese swimming is paying the price for a star-centred model, while the real strength of this sport lies in the steady flow of thousands of children taught to swim correctly each year. A REGIONAL COMPARISON: FOUNDATIONS DECIDE MEDALS Singapore was for years the number one swimming power in Southeast Asia. The interesting part is not their medals but how they built them: a dense club system, seriously organised school swimming, and a national training centre strong enough to retain talent. Japan goes further. Swimming is part of ordinary childhood, and an Olympic swimmer typically grows up through inter-school meets before joining the national squad. Major corporations run their own swim teams, turning the sport into a career with a salary, a pathway and a future. Talented people do not have to choose between swimming and a livelihood. Thailand and Indonesia have also built national swimming centres with standard pools and full-time coaching staff. The Philippines has university-linked sports scholarships, creating a parallel path between sport and education. Vietnam is different. Its swimming infrastructure is concentrated in a few big cities, and the number of 50m competition pools for nearly a hundred million people remains very modest. Most young athletes leave their families early to find somewhere to train, and many of them have no back-up plan if the dream collapses. You cannot build a swimming nation on a few dozen pools. You can only build a few lucky stars. COACHES: THE BOTTLENECK NOBODY MENTIONS There is a layer of the problem lower than medals and louder than any crowd: the coaching pool. A country can import experts for a few years, but it cannot import an entire generation of coaches. Japan has tiered swimming-coach education tied to national certification. Vietnam has outstanding individuals, but the number of people capable of coaching an athlete to continental standard can still be counted on two hands. Interviewing Vietnamese track coaches over many years, I recognised a familiar pattern: the best teachers end up juggling too much — coaching, feeding their athletes, scrambling for funding. That dedication is admirable, but it cannot replace a system. A coach exhausted by making ends meet has no energy left to study a new training plan. THE SPORTS BUSINESS: WHEN THE MONEY GOES THE WRONG WAY Here I want to raise something rarely mentioned in commentary on Vietnamese swimming — money. For years I have watched media platforms pour money into sports rights in the belief that viewers would follow them at any price. That race bears the marks of a bubble: rights costs rising faster than subscription revenue, until the highest bidder is forced to cut exactly where investment matters most. In swimming, that money rarely reaches the bottom. It flows into glossy events, into competitions with big audiences, into sponsorship deals tied to stars. Very little flows into the pool of a poor district where a child could learn to turn correctly. If the money in sport only circles the star, the star will always feel like a miracle rather than a product. THE CONTRARIAN ANGLE: A STAR IS NOT THE SOLUTION, SOMETIMES IT IS THE TRAP Here I want to say something I know will annoy some people. The success of a big star can become a drag on the sport itself. When Nguyen Thi Anh Vien collected SEA Games medals, sponsors were happy, fans were happy, and the pressure to reform the development system quietly disappeared. The star did the work of an entire machine. In sport, this is a subtle form of procrastination: you feel like you are winning, when in fact you are merely lucky that an exceptional individual was born at the right moment. When I look at how Japan handles its generations of swimmers, I see the opposite logic. There, a medal is treated as a by-product of a system, not the final goal. When Kosuke Kitajima retired, Japanese swimming did not collapse, because behind him were thousands of children practising turns every morning. Vietnam does not yet have that base. And the next generation of Vietnamese swimmers must swim in a space where everything is thin: thin specialised coaching, thin competitive meets, thin sports-science support. They swim against the current, not because they chose to, but because the system's flow does not push them forward. There is one detail I have kept in my head for years. At the 2026 SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur, I watched Nguyen Thi Huyen cross the line to win the 400m hurdles gold, sweat still wet on her skin, and I ran down to interview her while both our heart rates were still elevated. Huyen crossed the finish line, and I crossed the boundary of my own profession. Three weeks later, digging through old records, I discovered she had suffered a serious injury a few years earlier and nearly retired. What made her story moving was not the medal, but the silent stretch she had travelled alone. Vietnamese swimming is inside a similar silence. Nobody applauds a system that has just been built. People only applaud medals. THE ILLUSION OF SHORT COURSE AND LONG COURSE There is one more trap, and it is more technical. Most of Vietnamese swimming's regional results come from short-course 25m meets, where the number of turns doubles and everything becomes urgent. Short-course and long-course 50m performances obey two different training logics. Someone fast in short course is not automatically fast in long course, because short course rewards turn speed and manoeuvrability, while long course punishes every technical error with a longer stretch of time in which to expose it. Measured against long-course Olympic standards, most regional medals become modest milestones. There is nothing shameful in that. It is simply how we know where we stand. I sat in Tokyo in 2026, in the third bend of the stands, when Karsten Warholm ran the 400m hurdles and turned 45.94 seconds into a new version of human limits. Afterwards I wrote a piece within twenty minutes, and it travelled far. But what haunted me was not the record. It was the feeling of standing too close to a broken limit and understanding that it did not come from one magic night. It came from ten years of building that nobody filmed. In silence, an athlete's heart beats louder than any roar. THE WAY FORWARD: FROM STAR TO FLOW If I could say one thing to the people making decisions in Vietnamese sport, it would be this: stop looking for the next Anh Vien. Go and build a thousand pools. That sounds like a slogan, but it is the logic of the sport itself. The star is the result, not the cause. A country with millions of children who can swim correctly will incidentally produce ten Olympic-calibre swimmers, and among those ten there will be one capable of a medal. A country with a handful of pools must wait for miracles, and miracles do not repeat on a competition calendar. Vietnam has proved it can produce swimming talent. It has not yet proved it can produce swimming talent systematically. The distance between those two things is not a star. It is an entire generation. This is also where the idea of squad depth — something I normally use when analysing football teams — becomes useful for swimming. A football team cannot live on one star. Neither can a swimming nation. You need a bench deep enough that when the number one star falls, someone steps in; deep enough that one lost generation does not drag a whole country down with it. In football, I once wrote that inverted wingers are homogenising the game, and that traditional wide players are being wrongly erased. Swimming faces a similar homogenisation: everyone wants to be a freestyle star, while foundation events and basic skills are underrated. A healthy sport needs people who excel in the unglamorous events too. WHAT REMAINS AFTER ALL OF IT I write this from a city with many lakes and very few pools. Hanoi is beautiful and mysterious, but the children here grow up beside water while most of them cannot swim properly. There is something paradoxical in that image, and it deserves to be named far more than a SEA Games medal. Vietnamese sport is at an interesting stage: mature enough to be dissatisfied with regional wins, but not yet equipped to live at world level consistently. The space between those two is where everything is decided, and also where few people want to look, because there are no fireworks there. One day, a Vietnamese swimmer will step onto a continental podium or further, and the whole country will roar. I will be glad. But I will ask myself: how many pools stand behind them? How many children are practising turns this morning whose names nobody knows? If the answer is many, then that swimmer is not a miracle. They are a result. And a sport that lives on results lasts longer than a sport that lives on miracles. Empty stands in 2026 taught me that sport is never silent, it only changes its voice. Vietnamese swimming is changing its voice. The question is whether we are listening. My heart still beats to the rhythm of each lap — steady, the rhythm of silence, the rhythm of people who do not need applause to carry on. Running in silence. So is swimming.