The Writer at the Fence: Honoring the Unsung People of Vietnamese Sports

I did not choose journalism; journalism chose me on a running track in 2026. In the 37-degree heat of the national athletics stadium in Thu Dau Mot, I planned to write about the women's 1,500-meter champion. Then a small girl in lane seven caught my eye: her arm swing was not powerful, her stride was not long, yet her breathing was very steady. She finished fifth and no one surrounded her. I stayed at the fence for two more hours, watching her breathe and walk through recovery, then wrote a long story titled “The Fifth-Place Girl and an Unfinished Technique.” My editor called and asked, “Why did you ignore the champion?” I could not explain. My instinct told me that girl would go far, not because she won that day, but because she listened to her body. Four years later, Nguyen Thi Oanh stood on a SEA Games podium, and my story became a small milestone in her journey. But the story I want to tell is not about being right. I want to talk about how the regular season is becoming poorer because of an obsession with data. In every press room, I see colleagues opening laptops, building charts and arguing about PPDA, xG or endurance indexes. Many of those articles have value. But too many of them forget that matches are played by humans, not by software. Take badminton as an example. A high-level badminton match can last over an hour. Data can analyze shuttle speed, number of jumps, or shot accuracy. But data cannot tell you why a player called the team doctor in the middle of the third game, not because of an injury, but because he wanted his father in the stands to see him calm. I once watched a national-team assistant coach sit alone in a corner of the arena, without a computer, holding only a notebook. He recorded how often the player stepped off court during breaks, how much water he drank, how many times he looked at his racket. When I asked him about data analysis, he laughed: “My colleagues have a whole computer room. I have a pair of eyes. After twenty years, I know when an athlete is about to break.” He is not famous. His name is not on the tournament poster. But he is the one who weaves victories together. Articles praising athletes are common; I choose to praise him. That explains why I am often criticized for writing against the data trend. But I am not against numbers. I am uncomfortable when numbers are used to hide the real breath of a match. At the 2026 World Cup, the whole world wrote about Ronaldo after his hat-trick against Spain. I left the stands and went to the Morocco area to find a 19-year-old named Achraf Hakimi. My notes on Hakimi contained no extraordinary metric. Only three lines: he runs on the balls of his feet, he does not fall, he never looks at the clock. Today people call it talent. Back then I called it patience. When the article was published, many critics asked, “Why don't you use statistics?” I answered with a question: “Can statistics tell us how a 19-year-old abroad deals with homesickness and the pressure of a young football nation?” No one answered. Good data is data that listens to context. Data separated from humans is only expensive decoration. In 2026, without athletes, I discovered I could still run through imagination. When the pandemic stopped every arena, I lost sleep for three weeks. I could not interview in person or stand by a fence, and I thought I had run out of material. Then one evening I watched a runner training on a rooftop through a livestream. She was not fast, and she had no GPS watch. She was simply running and breathing. I realized sport does not begin with tournaments. Sport begins when a person knows they can push one more step. I called fifteen national track-and-field athletes and asked them to film their home workouts. We had no machines and no technical staff. But the series “Athletics During the Pandemic” reached 300,000 reads in two months, giving me one belief: readers are not thirsty for data; they are thirsty for connection. Between the pitch and the track, between badminton and athletics, between World Cup headlines and the story of a young athlete from Quang Ninh, I always find a common pulse. A sports writer does not need to run fastest; he only needs to be sensitive enough to hear the footsteps of those who are running. Have you ever stopped to ask the court cleaner what they saw after a match? I did, and those are the articles that make me proudest of this profession.