Vietnamese Women's Athletics: Medals Are Grown in One Province, Paid For in Another

On the final day of athletics at the 32nd SEA Games in Phnom Penh, I sat in the sixth row of stand B at Morodok Techo Stadium. Below me, the women's 3,000m steeplechase final was entering its last lap. The rain had just stopped, the track was still wet, and the sound of spikes scraping the surface was so clear I had to take off my headphones. Nguyen Thi Oanh cleared the final water jump, roughly two hundred metres from home. The stand behind me was four-fifths empty. A group of Cambodian fans clapped a few beats and fell silent. A few kilometres away, the men's football ground had not a single spare seat.

She crossed the line. I wrote in my notebook: a fourth gold medal in four days of competition. People saw a medal; I saw eight years of labour by a midland province and a contract that was never made public.

Context: a system built to count medals

"That rejected article is now the scar I cherish most." In July 2026, while the whole newsroom was consumed by the World Cup in Russia, I stayed behind to watch the final of the Women's U-20 World Cup between Japan and Spain. The Japanese girls pressed high all match, covering nearly 18.7 km per game, with nine ball recoveries in the opponent's final third. I wrote "The hellish pressing of Japan's U-20 women" and filed it to the men's World Cup desk. The editor cut it. I published it on my own page, coach Mai Duc Chung shared it, and it reached a million views in three days. I learned something then: in Vietnam, women's sport does not lack an audience. It lacks people who count properly.

Women's athletics in Vietnam runs on units. Every athlete holds a payroll place with a province, a city, or a ministry-backed body such as the Army or the Police. Food, accommodation, schooling, medicine and injury treatment all come from that unit's recurrent budget line. When she is called up to the national team, she still carries her unit's "hometown" in her file.

At the national championships and the National Sports Festival, an athlete competes for the unit that registered her. Changing units requires agreement between both sides and a one-off training compensation payment. The Festival, held every four years, is the biggest accounting event of all: a province's medal targets, next year's budget, and the career positions of an entire coaching staff all hang on the final table.

At the very top, the state bonus for a SEA Games gold medal is around 45 million dong, with more for a record. Each province adds its own award: some tens of millions, some hundreds of millions, some only a certificate and a permanent post. Men's football plays the same SEA Games, wins the same gold medal, and takes home bonuses and sponsorship contracts many times larger.

"She only made one video call, but it pulled me out of the pit." In April 2026, the national women's championship was cancelled after four rounds, the grounds were eerily empty, and I stopped writing for 54 days. Nguyen Thi Thanh Nha, then 19, called me in a flour-dusted shirt and showed off a hundred loaves of bread she had baked herself to fund her passion. I understood that the entire argument about prize money is only the visible part. The submerged part is a girl selling bread so she can keep running.

The core: who grows, who harvests

Across nearly four decades in the stands and more than twenty years watching domestic athletics finals, I have recognised a mechanism that repeats itself and that no final table ever prints: the value of a Vietnamese female athlete is created in a poor province and harvested where the budget is.

Take one athlete's slot apart. A twelve-year-old is spotted at a district-level school sports meet and recruited to the provincial sports training centre. From there to the national team threshold takes six to eight years. Throughout, the province pays for food at official rates, dormitory space, academic schooling, the salary of the coach in charge of the group, electricity and water for the track, and the injuries nobody counts: plantar fasciitis, hamstring tears, knee pain from too many laps on a concrete 400m circuit. Depending on local norms, one young athlete's slot consumes tens of millions of dong a year. Multiply that by eight years and the capital now sits inside the body of a twenty-year-old: in her lungs, her rhythm, the way she distributes effort over the last two hundred metres.

Most recruitment classes never arrive. Watching several cohorts at northern centres, I have seen a group of thirty twelve-year-olds usually dwindle to five or seven by eighteen, and from that group one or two may break into the national top tier. Every medal, in other words, is the peak of a pyramid whose base is a group of girls who left quietly and whose names nobody recorded.

The leak sits between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. This is when an athlete starts recording national-level marks, starts receiving youth national call-ups, and also when phones start ringing from the big units. The new unit pays a one-off training compensation, sometimes with a job placement, a higher monthly stipend, better training conditions. For the family of a seventeen-year-old from a rural district, that offer is not a temptation; it is a way out of poverty. Nobody has the right to blame her.

The problem is that the payment covers the past, not the future. It repays eight years of food bills, but it does not share the value she will generate over the following decade: SEA Games medals, Festival medals, Asian Games appearances, media image, and the budget targets the new province will win because of her results. The mechanism is identical to the loan-with-obligation-to-buy model in football: the small side develops, the big side uses, and the final beneficiary is never the place that trained her.

The human map makes it plain. Nam Dinh is athletics country, from Nguyen Thi Huyen in the 400m hurdles to Nguyen Linh Na in the heptathlon. Bac Giang produced Nguyen Thi Oanh, who won four gold medals at the 32nd SEA Games in the 1,500m, 3,000m steeplechase, 5,000m and 10,000m. Le Tu Chinh belongs to Ho Chi Minh City, in the 100m and 200m. The midland and delta provinces of the north are where the crop grows. Yet the prize money, the permanent posts and the best training conditions have for years clustered in the units with the deepest sports budgets.

There is a second loss, rarely discussed, and it happens right on the track. The women's 4x400m relay is where unit-based organisation bites hardest into performance. Baton exchange is not instinct; it is a skill polished over hundreds of repetitions, until two runners know each other well enough to sense that the other will leave the mark half a beat late. A continental-standard relay squad needs months of living together. Vietnam's national team assembles runners from different units in short camps. We tend to lose in the exchange zone rather than in raw speed. The time lost at the baton is exactly the time the unit system cannot supply.

Set side by side, the two most recent SEA Games show athletics is the largest medal mine for the Vietnamese delegation. At the 31st SEA Games on home soil in Hanoi in 2026, Vietnam topped the overall table, with athletics among the leading contributors of gold medals. At the 20th Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, from 19 September to 4 October 2026, the realistic target for Vietnamese women's athletics is not gold, but reaching finals and contending for medals in a handful of women's events. The gap between the regional and continental stages is far wider than the gap between Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. And that gap cannot be closed with prize money.

The counterintuitive view: money is being poured into the wrong end of the pipe

The familiar reaction after every Festival is a proposal to raise prize money. I think that fixes the top of the pipe while the water leaks at the bottom.

Prize money only reaches the athlete who is still on the track, usually aged 24 to 27. The decision to leave, however, is made at 16 to 18, when she has never received a single dong in prize money and has no reason to believe she will be rewarded six years later. Raising rewards for winners does not retain those about to quit. To retain them, you must pay at the point of leakage: a sports scholarship at sixteen, proper nutrition, a university place at the sports university, and an employment contract her family can actually read and understand.

The second assumption worth re-examining is the story of hiring foreign experts for the national team. One foreign coaching contract for a single event group costs roughly the annual salaries of several dozen young coaches teaching at provincial centres. One good expert can lift the training standard for ten elite athletes. A dozen provincial coaches paid a living wage will keep hundreds of fourteen-year-old girls on the track. This is not a choice between two good things; it is a choice between a grower and a harvester.

The biggest blind spot is the final table itself. It records only the unit that paid for the medal at the moment it was awarded. Nobody audits the unit that raised her from fourteen, nobody cross-checks the years, the injuries, the utility bills. Suppose the National Sports Festival table printed one extra column headed "training unit from age 14". The budget picture would flip within a single session. Sometimes fixing one column fixes the whole system.

On sponsorship, I have to say something uncomfortable. At domestic athletics meets, athletes wear their unit's vest. There is no space for a personal name, no space for her own sponsor. Meanwhile global brands pour their budgets into men's football, where shirt advertising exists, tickets sell, and return on investment can be measured minute by minute on air. Women's athletics has stories, images, emotion, and almost no inventory to sell. A sport that sells nothing remains dependent on state budgets, and state budgets are allocated by medal targets, which means by the final table again.

Takeaway: who grows the next crop

"In women's athletics, I am not looking for victory; I am looking for liberation." I still believe that, and I also still believe that liberation cannot come from a medal worth 45 million dong.

There is a very simple mechanism I have proposed in many conversations with provincial coaches: set aside a fixed percentage, paid for life, from every performance bonus an athlete receives, to the unit that trained her from the age of fourteen. No big fund, no conference required. Just one line in the regulations. A province that knows it will share in the next fifteen years has a reason to keep the seventeen-year-old rather than sell her off to close this year's target.

I am old, but every call from them makes me young again. The track taught me this: some lessons are never rejected. If a province grows the people and never harvests the fruit, then in the next recruitment class, who will step forward to plant?