Vietnamese Women's Athletics, Seen from the Empty Seats of the Stands

Late afternoon at a stadium in central Vietnam, the white chalk line on the 400-metre track has not yet faded. Stand A holds only three people: a woman clutching a handbag, leaning against the railing; an old coach in a thin raincoat; and a boy holding up a phone to film. Below them, a female athlete warms up for the final run of the training session. No spectators, no banners, no one calling her name over the loudspeaker. I sit in the seventh row, counting the empty seats. Twenty-three chairs around me have no one in them. The woman at the railing is the girl's mother. The old coach is the man who brought her from a mountain district to the city to train more than ten years ago. The boy filming is probably her younger brother. Three people, three seats, for an 800-metre run by the last finisher of that day's session. Before darkness falls completely, the girl finishes her distance, bends over to breathe, then walks alone toward the changing room. I stay another forty-five minutes, not waiting for anything, but wanting to understand that silence. Vietnamese women's athletics is one of the most durable medal mines of the country's sport on the regional stage. At recent SEA Games, women's middle-distance, long-distance, hurdles and relay events have regularly delivered gold medals. Names such as Nguyen Thi Oanh in the 1,500 metres, 3,000 metres steeplechase and 5,000 metres, Nguyen Thi Huyen in the 400 metres and 400 metres hurdles, or Bui Thi Thu Thao in the long jump have become familiar to followers of the Southeast Asian Games. But between a gold medal on the podium and a late-afternoon training session on an empty stand lies a distance few people count. Most of the story of Vietnamese women's athletics unfolds outside the television frame. It unfolds in twice-a-day training sessions, in ten-hour coach rides to a domestic meet, in months of eating in a collective canteen and sleeping in a dormitory. Based on my years of watching domestic athletics meets, I find this sport carries a paradox of its own: it is where results come from, yet it is the least visible place. Stadium stands are empty at most national meets. Tickets are free. Television appears only on finals days, and usually to capture the moment of crossing the line rather than to tell the story behind it. On the stands in Russia, I heard many empty seats named after women. I first wrote that sentence in 2026, when the whole newsroom turned to the World Cup and I was assigned to women's sport. Since then, that image has not grown old. It has only changed location: from the stands of a men's football tournament abroad to the stands of an athletics track at home. So where is Vietnamese women's athletics strong, and how is it strong? Looking at the structure of results at recent SEA Games, a fairly clear direction of investment emerges. Women's middle- and long-distance events, together with the 4x400-metre relay, are where the national team regularly contends for gold. This is not a random choice; it is the outcome of a strategy of picking points of focus within limited resources. Compared with the 100-metre and 200-metre sprints, where top speed depends heavily on innate qualities and sports-science conditions, the middle and long distances allow compensation through an endurance base, training discipline and racing tactics. A 1,500-metre runner can improve over many years, across training cycles, while a 100-metre runner is largely bounded by a ceiling of raw qualities. For a sport with a long time horizon and a modest budget, concentrating resources on endurance events is a reasonable choice. The way training is organised reflects that choice too. Most Vietnamese female track-and-field athletes grow up in provincial and municipal sports centres, then are selected for the national team. That path often begins very early, sometimes at eleven or twelve, when a physical-education teacher notices a child running faster than her peers. From there comes a long chain of moves: from school to a training centre, from a provincial centre to the national youth team, then the national team. Within that chain, the coach plays the role of almost a teacher, a father, a manager and a friend. A track-and-field coach in Vietnam often guides several athletes across different events at once, designs the training plans himself, monitors nutrition himself, and even handles the psychology before competition day himself. This model builds closeness and personal understanding, but it also makes deep specialisation by event group difficult. Seeing the individual within the collective ecosystem, I always notice one thing: no female track-and-field athlete runs alone. Behind every medal is a coach who wakes before sunrise, a patient physiotherapist, a collective-kitchen cook preparing balanced meals, a family back home waiting for news. When a girl crosses the line, many people go unnamed in that moment. That is the nature of athletics, and it is also what television rarely tells. Among the women's events, the 400 metres is the most brutal physiologically. It demands the speed of a sprinter and the endurance of a middle-distance runner, while the body endures a build-up of lactic acid from around the three-hundredth metre. A good 400-metre runner must learn to run through the pain, not avoid it. Precisely for this reason, the women's 4x400-metre relay has become one of the most compelling events in Vietnamese athletics: four people, each with a different character, but only one result. There, the individual cannot be separated from the collective, exactly as this sport operates. In longer events such as the 1,500 metres, 3,000 metres steeplechase or 5,000 metres, tactics play a decisive role. A runner races not only against the clock but also for position, for how to save energy, for when to launch the sprint. A female athlete can win not because she runs fastest, but because she runs smartest. This is where Vietnamese women's athletics has often shown its mettle, especially against opponents stronger in physicality. Let me offer a small comparison. A men's football match in the national league can draw thousands of spectators to the stadium, hundreds of thousands of online views, and an enormous volume of coverage. A competition day at the national athletics championships, where female athletes compete for places on the national team, often has only a few dozen people in the stands, most of them coaches and relatives. Two events, two levels of presence. That gap lies not in the quality of the sport, but in how we distribute our attention. Now let me speak of what happens at the edge of the track, which I consider the most precious material. Before each run there is a stretch of time spectators do not see: the athlete removes her shoes, checks her laces, stretches her calves, breathes deeply. Some pray. Some mutter the rhythm back to themselves. Some simply stand still, eyes fixed on the track as if measuring every metre. After the run come other moments: the winner bows in thanks, the loser sits down on the track, the coach runs out with a towel. These moments are not counted in the results, but they are where this sport truly lives. Forty-five minutes at the edge of the field, a lifetime that never grows old. In athletics, that margin is even longer. It is the morning endurance session before sunrise, the afternoon speed session under the sun, the evening strength session in a gym without air conditioning. A female athlete may give ten years to a brief span of competition, a few minutes each time she steps out. It is an investment no medal can measure. When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices suddenly become leaders. The mother sitting alone on the stand becomes an entire cheering squad. The boy with the phone becomes an entire television station. And the old coach, who led his pupil from a mountain district to the city, becomes the keeper of memory for a whole journey. What is worth saying is that Vietnamese women's athletics does not lack stories. It lacks storytellers. For years, I have watched female athletes be mentioned only when they win, and forgotten the moment they lose or get injured. How an athlete is treated after injury is the clearest measure of a sport. When someone has to prove herself immediately upon her return, that pressure does not help her come back; it only raises the risk of re-injury. I have seen female athletes return too soon because they feared losing their place, and then pay for it with many more months on the sidelines. Here is a paradox I want to put plainly. The competitive value and the commercial value of Vietnamese women's athletics are drifting apart. An athlete can be the fastest woman in Southeast Asia in her event and still lack a sponsorship contract sufficient to cover life after retirement. Conversely, a face with a striking appearance and a compelling story can be courted despite more modest results. This mismatch is not the athlete's fault. It is a consequence of how the domestic sports market works: where money flows toward attention, and attention flows toward what is easy to sell. People often say women's athletics needs more investment. But the better question is where to invest. If we only raise prize money for medals, we still only feed the top of the pyramid. Meanwhile, the base, made up of provincial centres, grassroots coaches and youth meets, is where it is decided whether there will still be anyone running in ten years. A contract has an expiry date, but a human story does not. If women's athletics is told long enough and deep enough, it will generate more lasting value than any short-term media campaign. I do not claim that every gap in women's sport is gender injustice. Some gaps come from technique, from tactics, from the particularities of a discipline. But when a female athlete is a regional champion and the stands are still empty, that is no longer a technical story. It is a story of whom we choose to see. Looking at a scoreboard, I learned to read what is not recorded. A track records not only times; it also records who woke at four in the morning, who travelled ten hours by bus, who was patient for ten years. Vietnamese women's athletics will change when we begin to count what is not on the electronic board, and when the empty seats on the stands are filled not by the spectators of a single finals day, but by the attention of an entire long road.