The Empty Spreadsheet and the Miracle Trap of Vietnamese Swimming

That morning, I opened my swimming performance spreadsheet and typed the name of a young athlete whom a few news sites had just called a new phenomenon of Vietnamese swimming. The time column returned blank. The distance column returned blank. The date, the meet, the pool, the timekeeper's name — all empty. I sat staring at the screen for a long while. Nineteen years of following swimming had taught me that every race leaves a trace; the only question is whether anyone bothers to record it. This time, the trace did not exist — or it existed somewhere no one cared to keep.

I once thought this was a small thing. An empty spreadsheet can simply be filled in. But the longer I work in this trade, the more I realize that an empty data cell is not an empty cell. It is a statement.

My workflow has one unbreakable rule: null-value handling. When a field has no data, I am not allowed to guess. I am not allowed to infer. I must mark it as insufficient information, cannot assess, and move on. It sounds simple, but it is the hardest rule in the profession to obey, because the human instinct is to fill the gap. We hate emptiness. We would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.

Vietnamese swimming is living inside exactly that kind of gap.

A pool with no lane markers

If you asked me for the best result by a Vietnamese swimmer in the 200-meter individual medley over the past three years, it might take me days to answer. Not because I am lazy. Because the data does not exist in a form anyone can look up. There are meets where results are published only as a photo of a scoreboard taped to a stadium wall, then shared through social media groups, then lost. There are competitions where people remember times by feeling — faster than last year, slower than expected — rather than by number.

Let me be clear from the start: the biggest problem in Vietnamese swimming is not the pool, not the coaches, not the physical condition. The problem is that we are swimming without lane markers. A sports system without standardized data cannot evaluate itself. It can only tell stories about itself.

Compare. In leading swimming nations, every athlete from the junior level already has a digital file: split times, start velocity, stroke count per length, distance per stroke, turn timing, and the error margin across meets. No one needs to trust a feeling. They read a chart. A coach there can point out that an athlete is losing two percent in the final 15 meters of each length — a technical flaw the naked eye cannot see, but the regression line can.

In Vietnam, most of those metrics do not exist. We have a final time, sometimes. We almost never have split data. We have no career-long database for athletes. And when data is absent, narrative replaces numbers.

There is a small technical detail that says a lot. In swimming, the unit of measurement is one hundredth of a second. At the international level, races are decided by margins so small the human eye cannot distinguish them. That means data is not a luxury; it is a minimum condition for survival. An athlete who trails a rival by half a second over 100 meters may have a turn flaw, or lack a strength cycle, or simply have mistimed the pace. Without split data, all three hypotheses are equally true. And when every hypothesis is equally true, none of them is useful.

In many provinces, times are still recorded with a handheld stopwatch. The error of a single manual press can reach several tenths of a second — larger than the entire gap between a gold medal and fourth place in a short event. When the input data carries an error margin bigger than the thing it is trying to measure, every downstream analysis is meaningless.

Three failure modes of a data pipeline

I often picture sports data collection as a pipeline. At the intake, raw events are extracted: who swam, which distance, what time, what date, what meet. In the middle, the data is cleaned and standardized. At the outlet, it is analyzed and turned into conclusions. This pipeline can break at three points, and each break leaves a different kind of consequence.

The first failure mode is an empty intake. No one recorded it, or someone recorded it but no one saved it. The result is that when you need to analyze, the table returns zero. This failure mode is the most dangerous, because it produces no visible error. It produces only silence. And silence, in sports, is usually mistaken for calm.

The second failure mode is a distorted intake. The data exists, but it is skewed: a handheld stopwatch instead of electronic timing, a non-standard distance, unrecorded pool conditions. This kind of data is worse than no data at all, because it creates a false sense of safety. You think you are analyzing, but in reality you are regressing on noise.

The third failure mode is a fabricated outlet. When the intake is empty, instead of stopping and saying there is insufficient information, people fill the gap with inference. A provincial champion is described as a future national-record breaker. A junior cohort is called a golden generation before it has ever competed internationally. A miracle is just a data point that has not been regressed — and when no one bothers to regress, miracles multiply.

These three failure modes are not mutually exclusive. They usually travel together. An empty intake leads to a fabricated outlet. A distorted intake leads to false confidence. And all three together create an information ecosystem where people can no longer tell measured fact from retold story.

I often tell colleagues that data does not create itself, and it does not disappear by itself either. It gets forgotten. In Vietnam, countless competition results once existed on paper, in referees' notebooks, on organizers' scoreboards, then drifted into oblivion over time. This is a silent kind of loss. No one loses it in a single moment. People lose it little by little, a bit each year, until no one remembers it ever existed.

The gap between stars and the many

There is a paradox in Vietnamese swimming data that I have observed for years. The most famous athletes are the ones with the most complete data. Nguyen Thi Anh Vien, with hundreds of international races, and Nguyen Huy Hoang, with continental medals — their performance records are relatively clear, because the media and international federations are forced to record them. But the further down you go into the junior ranks, the thinner the data becomes. At the provincial, school, and small-club levels, the data is close to zero.

This creates a counterintuitive effect. We know a great deal about those who have already made their name, and almost nothing about those who are on their way to making it. But it is the second group that decides the future of the sport. A sport that wants to grow sustainably must be able to see into the pipeline behind it, not only the stage lights in front.

I once joined a small project, trying to reconstruct performance records for a group of junior athletes. The work lasted weeks, and the result was grim: more than half the athletes did not have enough data to draw even a simple progression line. We knew they had swum. We did not know whether they were getting faster or slower.

For an athlete like that, every compliment is a guess. And so is every criticism.

A contrarian view: the gap is never neutral

Most people believe a data gap is neutral. No information means no opinion. But in practice, a gap is never neutral. It is a funnel that sucks every story into it. When numbers are absent, what replaces them is not the truth, but something more attractive than the truth: a good story.

I have watched this happen across many SEA Games. Before each edition, the media builds up golden candidates, records about to fall, new generations about to make history. After the Games, when results fall short, people explain it with reasons that cannot be verified: psychology, weather, hidden injuries. Both ends of the story are built on the same foundation — the absence of data.

Numbers do not lie, but the people who read numbers do. The problem is that in Vietnam, most of us do not even have numbers to misread. We have a gap, and we fill it with belief.

This is why I dislike the word miracle. A miracle is a polite way of saying analytical laziness. When someone says a Vietnamese athlete reaching a continental final is a miracle, they are saying they do not understand why it happened. But with split data, training records, and competition history, that wonder would dissolve into an ordinary chain of causes: a better start technique, a sensible pacing strategy, an injury-free training year. Every shock has a portrait in the old data. We simply do not draw that portrait because we never kept the photograph.

What is worrying is not the lack of medals

I want to close with a thought that may irritate more than a few people. Vietnamese swimming can keep winning medals at the regional level without a decent data system. That is entirely feasible. A few outstanding individuals, a few good training centers, a few concentrated investments can deliver results for several more editions.

But if the goal is a swimming nation that can reproduce success on its own, then what we lack is not medals. What we lack is the ability to see ourselves. Without data, we do not know whether we are advancing or retreating. We only know how we feel. And feeling is a poor adviser for a national sports program.

I do not believe in luck; I believe in the margin of error. A mature sports nation is not measured by nights of medals, but by its ability to answer one very simple question: is this athlete getting better or worse, and why? If we cannot answer that question with data, then every other conclusion is just an echo in an empty room.

Data only dies when we stop asking questions. And the empty spreadsheet I opened that morning is not a full stop. It is a reminder: before asking why Vietnam has not produced more swimming champions, ask why we have never recorded enough to know where we stand.