Three Branches of Martial Arts and the Data Void in Vietnamese Combat Sports

The file reached me at 11 p.m., just after the third round of a bout in Nha Trang had ended. It was named with a single word: “martial arts”. Inside, it was empty. No fighter’s name, no ruleset, no weight class, not one line recording how many strikes were thrown. The sender added one sentence: “Take a look and write it up for me.”

I sat still in front of the screen for a long while. Twenty-two years in the trade, eight years in press rooms, and I had never seen a request lay out so plainly the gap that Vietnamese sport is stuck in. When a press room collapses, I learned that truth does not need a microphone; it finds its own way. But truth also needs to be written down. The problem sits at the stage where we name things.

In sport, the classification label decides almost everything about how people analyse. Football has goals and passes. Athletics has times and distances. Martial arts has no shared yardstick, because under that one name there are at least three branches with three completely different logics.

The first branch is modern combat sport: MMA, boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai, wrestling. Results are measured by wins and losses, by strikes landed per minute, by takedown defence rate. The second is performance martial arts — taolu in wushu, poomsae in taekwondo, kata in karate. There is no opponent there. Points come from the difficulty of the movement and deductions for technical faults. The third is sanda, where kicks and punches live alongside throws under one rulebook.

Those three branches are collapsed into a single word in most news copy, funding files and training lists. The consequence is very concrete: a sanda fighter and a taolu athlete can sit on the same budget line, carry the same medal target, and still not share a single unit of measurement.

The irony is that many disciplines are already split in two. Wushu has taolu and sanda. Taekwondo has forms and sparring. Karate has kata and kumite. Inside a single federation, people already have to use two sets of criteria. Yet once it reaches the news, everything goes back to one word.

If I had to name a single bottleneck, I would pick data. A martial arts scene with no separate dataset for each branch can only be commentated on, not analysed.

Take the clearest example. For MMA, the standard metrics are strikes landed per minute, strikes absorbed per minute, takedown defence rate. For boxing, people count punches landed against punches thrown, split into jab, cross, hook, uppercut. For sanda, the scoreboard separates valid strikes from throws, each with different weighting. For taolu, judges score difficulty and deduct for loss of balance, pauses and errors of range.

A boxer such as Truong Dinh Hoang is measured by punches landed. An MMA fighter in LION Championship is measured by takedown defence. A wushu taolu athlete is measured by a deduction sheet. Three people, three datasets, and none of the sheets works for the other two.

Those four sets of criteria cannot be converted into one another. Nobody takes an MMA fighter’s takedown defence rate to evaluate a poomsae athlete. But in professional meetings in Vietnam, I have heard the line many times: “Our martial arts are still weak.” The line is not wrong; it just does not say anything.

From my experience watching bouts, the first habit is always dissection. In 2026, after a senior reporter remarked that women know nothing about tactics, I went home and rewatched fourteen matches of a team to note every movement. That method matters even more in martial arts, because here there is no goal to hide the margins of error.

Alongside competition data, condition tracking also splits three ways. In combat sport, the age curve comes with weight-cutting magnitude and the number of strikes absorbed. In taolu, wear comes from joints and back, from thousands of repetitions. In sanda, both risk groups coexist in one person.

In the combat group, three health risks always top the list. Cumulative head trauma, which medicine calls chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Weight cuts past the safety threshold. And the welfare gap after retirement. All three can only be measured if someone records from the start. No records, no warnings.

The organisational picture splits the same way. Modern combat sport runs around a few giants: UFC, ONE Championship, PFL after merging with Bellator. Professional boxing sits with four title bodies: WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO. Wushu has the International Wushu Federation. Each system has its own rankings, its own route to a title shot, its own exclusive contracts.

The result is that a good fighter can have their value split across several systems while fans cannot tell where the true peak is. Fragmented belts in boxing have lasted decades. Mixed martial arts went the other way, concentrating around a few brands, and fighters got less bargaining power in return.

Money also runs by branch. In professional combat sport, revenue comes from tickets, pay-per-view and sponsorship, and the fighter revenue share has been a long-running flashpoint. In performance disciplines, money comes mainly from state budgets and state sponsorship, which means a four-year cycle rather than an event cycle.

Every branch of martial arts transmits power along the same pipeline: from the gym upstream, through the promoter in the middle, to broadcast and the consumer market downstream. Whoever holds the downstream captures the value. Vietnam is standing upstream.

At the level of rules, the split is even clearer. MMA uses a unified rulebook, boxing uses each body’s own rules, sanda has its own scoring sheet, taolu has its own difficulty system. A scoring appeal in taolu cannot be settled with MMA logic, and the reverse holds too. The absence of a shared appeals mechanism lets disputes drag on in silence.

Here is a paradox I want to put on the table. People often say Vietnamese martial arts lack data, and the fix is to collect more. I do not fully believe that direction.

Collecting more without sorting by branch first only produces a pile of mixed figures — enough to draw charts, not enough to conclude anything. Worse, it pushes us into applying one discipline’s metrics to another. An MMA fighter is marked down for having no taolu record. A kata athlete is called lacking in fighting spirit. Both are classification errors, not human ones.

The second risk lies in the value chain. When Vietnamese gyms are standardised to foreign organisations’ criteria, we train better but we also export talent better. The most profitable segment still sits where events are staged and rights are sold. An athlete like Nguyen Thi Tam reaching an international stage is her achievement, and also a sign that the value is being created somewhere else.

I do not believe in the tactical map; I believe in the crack in the map. The crack here is that we have never sat down to draw the boundary between the three branches, while money and people crossed that boundary long ago.

Being multi-discipline is not a loss of direction; it is how you catch the same undercurrent. But multi-discipline only means something when each discipline is called by its right name.

If a file labelled “martial arts” can still be empty, then the problem was never a shortage of writers. The problem is that nobody has been willing to name what they are looking at. Every race has a corner that only those unafraid of falling can see. The corner for Vietnamese martial arts sits on the first line of every file: is this sanda, or is this taolu?