One Mat, One Ring, Two Measuring Sticks

I picked a seat in the fourth row, exactly on the line that splits the arena into two worlds.

On my left, on the mat, a female martial artist in a white uniform stands alone. There is no opponent in front of her. The only sounds in that space are her breathing, the slap of a foot landing after a spinning jump, and the pens of three judges moving across their score sheets. Three hundred people in the stands hold their breath so completely that I can hear the ceiling fans. On my right, thirty metres away, is the ring. Two fighters are trading kicks to the ribs, and every time the impact lands, the stands roar like one enormous speaker.

Same afternoon. Same ticket. Same word — “score.” Two universes. I wrote in my notebook: if someone asks me tomorrow how Vietnamese martial arts did today, I have to ask a question first. Which martial art?

I have covered martial arts since my university years, when my big assignment was counting bouts at a youth tournament and writing about them as if they were football. I was wrong for a long time. One National Sports Festival folds dozens of disciplines into a single bulletin: vovinam, wushu, boxing, muay, pencak silat, judo, karate, taekwondo, wrestling, traditional martial arts. On the results board, all of it collapses into one column of words: gold medal, silver medal. In the newspaper, all of it collapses into one pair of words: win and loss. A taolu medal won by Duong Thuy Vi and a boxing medal won by Nguyen Thi Tam are laid side by side, same font size, same colour, same headline.

Media language compresses every martial art into a single currency. Measuring systems refuse to be compressed that way. In my notebook there is a page I call the measuring-stick page, and that page holds four lines. Those four lines explain almost every misunderstanding I have met while reading Vietnamese martial arts coverage.

Measuring stick one: decision by judges. Sanda, karate, taekwondo and amateur boxing live here. Under rules applied from 2026, men's amateur boxing is fought over three rounds of three minutes under the 10-point must system: each round has a winner, and the round winner receives ten points. Sanda runs on a different beat: a maximum of three rounds, win two rounds and you win the bout, points count only inside a round, and one clean throw can erase two minutes of accumulated work. Both are called “points,” but one is a point for ranking and the other is a point for taking a single competitive unit. Get that layer wrong and a report will say “a three-nil win” about a bout the winner took by a single kick in the deciding round.

Measuring stick two: the early finish. MMA and professional boxing live on the rate of finishing a fight before the time limit, and there a fighter who wins on points is treated as lacking power. In Vietnam the professional circuit is thin, the number of bouts is small and the opposition is uneven, so importing the early-finish rate as a measure of a fighter's worth is a borrowed reading. A boxer who wins every fight on points in the amateur game is doing exactly what the rulebook rewards him for: clean scoring shots, no fouls, no open flank.

Measuring stick three: performance scoring. Wushu taolu is scored across three panels: panel A for movement quality, panel B for the overall quality of the routine, panel C for difficulty. Poomsae, the forms section of vovinam and traditional forms all belong to this family. The athlete has nobody in front of her. Her opponent is herself at the previous competition, the difficulty list the organisers publish before she steps onto the mat, and the technical ceiling the human body permits. This is where I have written most over the past two years, and where fewest people read: the difficulty race. As the C score rewards higher difficulty, routines tilt towards spinning jumps, single-leg landings and excessively wide opening angles. The consequences land on knees, ankles and Achilles tendons, on athletes aged eighteen to twenty-two. Look at the score sheet and you see a beautiful routine. Look at the treatment room and you see a long list.

Every martial art has its own measuring system, and once you apply the wrong system, every conclusion that follows is wrong too — including the conclusions that sound highly technical.

Measuring stick four: the throw. Judo, wrestling and the sparring section of vovinam. A single ippon, or one qualifying throw, can end a bout in three seconds with seventeen minutes still on the clock. There is no narrative of momentum to tell, no accumulated points to lean on. A writer raised on football gets restless, because here there is only one moment, and the moment arrives and leaves before I can open my notebook.

Those four lines give me a test. Before every piece I ask myself: what does this discipline measure by? If the answer is judges, I am not allowed to talk about “domination” when the judges' score is 3-2 after three rounds. If the answer is difficulty, I am not allowed to make winning and losing the main axis. If the answer is the throw, I am not allowed to build a long play-by-play about momentum. Every time I have got it wrong, I landed in exactly one of those three places.

Based on my experience of following these competitions, the most common error among young writers is not misreading the rules; it is reading one discipline's rules correctly and then carrying them across to another. Asking a taolu athlete who her opponent is today is a meaningless question: the honest answer is herself last month. Using the medal table as a national ranking of martial arts strength is a false comparison, because the number of events, the number of weight classes and the decision over which sports are admitted to the programme set the medal ceiling before anyone steps onto the mat. Calling someone a “champion” in an event with three entrants is decoration. And folding the health risks of every discipline into the single word “injury” ignores the difference between rapid weight-cutting, landing load, and the accumulation of impacts to the head.

The stands are a living organism that can speak, and that organism has blind spots too. Casual viewers believe martial arts means fighting. That belief pushes the most beautiful contents of the system into the margins: taolu, poomsae, forms. At one competition with no spectators, when the whole arena held nothing but the sound of feet landing and plastic chairs shifting, I heard the loudest thing most clearly: the missing roar. That empty arena taught me that what I had been calling “atmosphere” is in fact a data source, and that data source can lose power at any moment.

The second blind spot is newer and more troubling. The analytics wave is walking into the training hall. Dashboards count strikes, measure distance, compute output, and deliver conclusions that look very solid. Following a team, I see those dashboards are usually built on a different beat from the rhythm of the gym floor. The gap between a routine scored 9.70 and one scored 9.72 lives in the last three seconds: the angle of a wrist, the balance of a landing, the ripeness of a movement that no sensor in the room records. Data tells me what happened. It does not tell me what almost happened. A martial arts writer has to keep that second half, because most of the story of a martial art lives in what almost happened.

There is one more counter-intuitive point, and it belongs to the meeting room rather than the ring. At many Games, Vietnam's martial arts results are settled before the referee blows the whistle: whether a sport is admitted to the competition programme, how many weight classes are retained, whether organisers invite enough international judges. Those decisions set the ceiling for every medal that follows. Fans do not need me to give them a voice; they need me to stand on the side of that voice — but I have one more job: to show them the meeting room that voice never enters.

From next season I will do one simple, persistent thing. Every martial arts piece will open with a line that fixes the rules of the game: which discipline, which scoring system, how many rounds, who scores, who has the right to protest. That line is short, dry and unglamorous, and precisely for that reason it saves the whole article from saying something false about a human being.

And I will keep hunting the love story behind every appearance, because in martial arts the thing I hunt for is always a love story: between a person and a form, between a coach and a student, between a crowd and a silent mat.

If the measuring stick is wrong, people will see weakness in someone who has just done everything the rules demand. So next season — which stick will we choose?