After Anh Vien: The Map of Vietnamese Swimming and the Stars Still Asleep

In 2026, at the national swimming championships at the My Dinh Aquatic Sports Palace, I sat in the third row, holding two stopwatches. In lane 4, a sixteen-year-old girl touched the wall in the 200m individual medley. Time: 2 minutes 19.47 seconds. The stands were silent. No applause, no cheers. I bent down and wrote in my notebook: "Not a record. But a signal." Six years earlier, at this same arena, Nguyen Thi Anh Vien swam under 2:12, the stands were packed, television cameras tracked every warm-up movement. Six years later, no one in the stands knew the name of the girl swimming in lane 4. That is why I am sitting here, holding a stopwatch instead of a phone.

Vietnamese swimming has lived in the shadow of Nguyen Thi Anh Vien for nearly a decade. In 2026, at the age of fifteen, she won her first SEA Games gold medal in Palembang. By 2026, when she left the international stage, she had won more than twenty SEA Games medals and broken numerous national and regional records. For many years, Anh Vien was not only the sole hope of the nation's swimming, but also an entire system — training centers, sponsorship, media — revolving around a single name.

What happens when that system loses its axis? The answer lies in numbers few bother to count.

At the 2026 SEA Games in Cambodia, Vietnamese swimming won its fewest gold medals in more than a decade. At the 2026 SEA Games in Thailand, the figure did not improve significantly. The coaching staff blamed lack of investment. The media blamed lack of talent. But when I sat down with the detailed results of every heat, every semifinal, a different picture emerged.

The problem is not that we lack good swimmers. The problem is that we do not know who we have.

I began building a small database in 2026, recording the results of every Vietnamese swimmer under eighteen at national meets, national junior meets, and regional competitions. Altogether more than four hundred athletes, nearly a thousand swims, and for each swim I recorded three points: overall time, split time, and final-split time. This took two years, most of it spent watching videos and manually hitting the stopwatch because organizers do not publish detailed splits.

It is the most tedious work a sports commentator can do. But it is the most necessary work.

The first thing I discovered: there is a very clear technical gap between the group of swimmers who reach the international B-cut standard and the group that only reaches the national standard, but that gap does not lie in swimming speed. It lies in how effort is distributed across the splits. Swimmers who reach the B-cut swim the first split 0.4 seconds slower than the rest, but swim the final split 1.2 seconds faster. They know how to save ammunition.

It sounds simple. But in swimming, this is equivalent to a football player understanding when to sprint and when to conserve energy. In Vietnam, most young swimmers are taught to "go all out from start to finish" — a legacy of training methods from the subsidy era, when stamina was considered the sole deciding factor.

The second point: physique is not the barrier we think it is. In my database, seven of the ten athletes with the best times in the 100m and 200m are under 1m75 tall. Anh Vien was 1m72 at her peak. Yet Vietnamese media for years has been obsessed with the American and Australian model of the "tall athlete with a long arm span," quietly eliminating smaller children at the very first selection round.

I asked a coach about this. He said: "Tall people swim better, there is nothing wrong with that." Physically, he is right — a long arm span helps each stroke cycle cover more distance. But in swimming, the advantage of arm span only materializes if the athlete has good enough water-holding technique. A smaller athlete with good technique will swim more efficiently than a tall one with poor technique. And in Vietnam, most swimming centers select by eye rather than by stopwatch.

The third point, and this is the part that forced me to rewrite my own conclusion: the best group of athletes is not in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.

When I filtered the data by locality, an unexpected pattern emerged. The large swimming centers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City produce the most athletes who meet the national standard, but the rate of athletes who reach the international standard is strangely lower. Conversely, a few small centers in Da Nang, Quang Binh, and even Can Tho have a conversion rate from "national athlete" to "international athlete" three times higher.

Why?

The answer lies in the water environment. The large centers usually train in pools with stable temperature, clear water, and little turbulence. The small centers in coastal and river-delta provinces must train in less ideal conditions — fluctuating temperatures, unpredictable currents, poor underwater visibility. In theory, this is a disadvantage. In practice, it creates athletes with a much higher capacity to adapt to diverse competition conditions, and that is precisely the decisive skill on the international stage, where you never compete in a pool identical to the one you train in.

This is where I need to be clear about a prejudice I once held. For many years, I believed Vietnamese swimming needed "the next Nguyen Thi Anh Vien." I wrote articles soliciting sponsorship for young talents. I called for investment in top training centers. I praised children whose body indices resembled Anh Vien's. I was wrong.

The truth is: Vietnamese swimming does not lack a star; it lacks a system that knows how to count and how to look.

As I tracked the young athletes in my database, I realized the miracle does not lie in any individual. It lies in the fact that athletes trained in a healthy competitive environment and evaluated by data — not by sentiment — tend to have longer careers and higher results. They are not geniuses. They are ordinary people placed in the right spot.

And here is the most ironic part of the story.

While I spent two years counting and recording, the regional countries — Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia — had already been doing this systematically for more than a decade. They have no secret at all. They simply do the boring work that we do not.

Singapore has a national swimming data center, where every athlete from age twelve is closely monitored for results, splits, and physical development. Thailand has a network of coaches trained in data analysis. Malaysia has a youth competition system organized regularly, giving talents the chance to develop gradually through levels.

What does Vietnam have? We have good competitions, dedicated coaches, and a few outstanding athletes. But we have no data. And when you have no data, you lose the best people without ever knowing you lost them.

Two years ago, I once mispronounced the name of a young swimmer on radio. The boy's name was Nguyen Huu Thanh, and at fifteen, he swam the 100m butterfly in 55.8 seconds — a number that, by my estimate, was the fastest in Vietnam at that age in ten years. But because I mispronounced his name, no one in the audience could find information about him. And a few months later, he left the pool because his family could not afford to let him continue training.

The lesson I drew from that was not that pronunciation must be more accurate. The lesson is: a star forgotten before being named never becomes a star.

If we do not know the names of those swimming in lane 4, we have no right to say we are investing in the future of Vietnamese swimming.

I want to add one more thing about gender prejudice, because it relates directly to this topic. In my database, young female athletes in Vietnam often achieve higher results than male athletes of the same age at fourteen to seventeen, yet they receive less investment and less recognition. When I asked a male coach about this, he said: "Girls have to focus on school, they can't swim long-term." That statement reflects a prejudice deeply rooted in the selection system, and it causes us to lose many talents before they can prove themselves.

Once again, my own personal experiences remind me of this. In 2026, when I asked about the tactical formation of a women's football team at the Paris Olympics, an older male journalist whispered that "women don't know anything about pressing." I did not argue. I just recorded and wrote. And when I look at Vietnam's swimming pool, I see the same story repeating — except here, the water has no voice, so the prejudice is even harder to awaken.

So what is the fix?

The first, and perhaps the most important: build a national swimming database, starting at the grassroots level. No need for high technology. No need for million-dollar investment. Just one person at each center responsible for recording athletes' results, splits, and updating them on a shared platform. If we do this for three years, we will know who we have.

The second: change the selection method. Do not judge physique by eye. Look at technique, adaptability, and — most importantly — the improvement index over time. A smaller athlete can swim better than a taller one if trained correctly. And in Vietnam, we have many smaller athletes being forgotten.

The third: invest in young female athletes. Do not let gender prejudice repeat what happened to so many generations. If the data shows they are swimming better, give them corresponding opportunities.

The fourth, and the hardest: allow failure. Young athletes need to compete more, and not fear that one loss will end their careers. In Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, young athletes compete in dozens of meets each year. In Vietnam, the number is usually no more than three. Competition experience cannot be replaced by anything — no matter how well you swim in the training pool.

And finally, I want to return to the story of the sixteen-year-old girl at My Dinh.

After the competition ended, I found her name. She swam at a small center in Quang Binh, coached by a former national athlete. For three years, no article wrote about her. No sponsorship. No one tracked her swimming except a small group of relatives.

And she had just swum faster than any sixteen-year-old Vietnamese athlete in the past five years.

This is exactly what I want you to remember: in the pool, water does not know anyone's name. Water only knows speed and efficiency. If we refuse to count and record, we will continue to walk past stars without recognizing them, and those stars will sink to the bottom of the pool like a signal that was never called by name.

Vietnamese swimming does not need a new Anh Vien. It needs a generation of workers patient enough to count every split of children whose names are not yet on the scoreboard. When we can do that, the light will find its way — as water always finds its way to the sea, no matter how many pool walls people build before it.

Tomorrow, I will go to the pool again. I will hold two stopwatches again. And I will record in my notebook a name that perhaps no one will remember — until they swim fast enough that the world is forced to turn its head.

That is the work. Not glorious, but necessary. And I am lucky to do it.