Five Blank Columns on Vietnam's Track and Field Results Sheets

A results sheet from a national track and field meet has fourteen columns. The eleventh says "wind", and it is blank for every sprint event. The thirteenth says "reaction time", also blank. The final column says "splits", blank again. The only thing fully filled in is the finishing time — and that is also the only thing nobody argues about.

I kept that sheet. It sits in a notebook alongside similar sheets gathered from seven different meets, accumulated over nine years of watching Vietnamese athletics from the stands, from press tribunes, and lately from a documentary editing desk. Each sheet is blank in its own way. Every kind of blank leads to the same outcome: we are reading a race using one third of the data that race actually produced.

An internationally standard results sheet looks entirely different. It carries wind speed in metres per second, reaction time in milliseconds, splits at every 100 or 200 metres, an altitude note if the meet takes place above 1,000 metres above sea level, and information about the shoes the athlete wore.

Those columns exist for very specific technical reasons, not to make a dossier look pretty. World Athletics sets the legal wind speed for record recognition at +2.0 m/s in sprint, long jump and triple jump events. Above that threshold, a mark still counts for winning and losing, but it does not enter the record books. On equipment, since 30 April 2026, road shoe stack height has been capped at 40mm; since 1 January 2026, track spikes have been capped at 25mm.

In Vietnam, most domestic results sheets keep only the time column. The cause is not laziness on the organisers' part. A wind gauge needs periodic calibration. Reaction-time equipment needs sensors mounted inside the starting blocks and a stable transmission system. A split system needs high-speed cameras placed at multiple points around the track. All three cost money, all three need trained operators, and all three fall outside the spending categories of most domestic meets.

The result is a familiar paradox. We have plenty of numbers but very little information. And numbers without context always tend to inflate themselves.

The blank wind column

In sprints, long jump and triple jump, a helpful tailwind can shave two to three percent off a time. For an athlete running 100m in 11 seconds, that percentage equals two to three tenths of a second — enough to reorder the placings in a Southeast Asian final, where the gap between gold and bronze is often under a tenth.

When the wind column is blank, readers assume every mark was measured under identical conditions. That assumption is wrong, and it is wrong in a direction that favours the meets with the least equipment. A meet that does not measure wind will inadvertently turn every fast run into a "clean" mark, regardless of actual conditions on the track. Conversely, an athlete who delivers a strong result into a headwind will not be properly credited, because nobody knows the headwind existed.

Nguyễn Thị Huyền was for years a pillar in the 400m hurdles and the relay squads — distances less wind-sensitive than the 100m but still inside the zone that needs measuring. The missing wind column turns every cross-season comparison between Vietnamese athletes into a comparison between undefined conditions.

The gift from the shoe sole

Since carbon-plated shoes became standard among elite athletes, the performance curve at every distance from 800m upward has shifted. A young athlete who breaks through in the very year they receive new shoes has not necessarily improved physiologically. They may simply be harvesting an equipment dividend.

This does not mean the mark is worthless. It means the mark needs to be compared against that same athlete in the previous season, in the same shoe type, under the same conditions. In Vietnam, where many young athletes move from general shoes to specialist shoes within a single season, the equipment-driven shift can be larger than the genuine training improvement. The results sheet has no shoe column, so that dividend is credited entirely to human effort.

One run is not a level

One fast run is not a level. It is an event. Track and field has a very high coefficient of variation between competitions: the same athlete, the same distance, two consecutive weeks can differ by half a second over 400m purely because of weather, schedule and track quality.

The fix is simple in principle but time-consuming: track the curve instead of the point. Three consecutive outings is the minimum reading unit, and five is the threshold I set for myself before drawing any conclusion in my documentary work. Nguyễn Thị Oanh at SEA Games 32 in Phnom Penh is the finest example of both the strength and the trap of reading results in isolation.

She won both the 1,500m and the 3,000m steeplechase in the same session, the two events separated by roughly two hours. The popular media framing is "four gold medals". That framing is correct, but it says very little about what actually happened on the track.

What actually happened lies in the structure of the events. The 1,500m and the 3,000m steeplechase draw on two different energy systems. The steeplechase demands vertical power and ankle resilience across seven barriers per lap, while the 1,500m demands sustained threshold speed for about four minutes. Running both in one session is not simply a matter of endurance; it is a matter of recovery between two starts: what to eat, what to drink, how to warm up again, and how to handle media pressure in that short window.

No results sheet records those two hours. And that is why a gold medal never tells its own full story.

Marks without officials

Occasionally a mark surfaces from a training session and spreads like a turning point. It is not a record. It is not ratified by World Athletics. It has no officials, no official measuring equipment, and often no specific date.

Its real value lies elsewhere: it is an internal signal, used to decide whether to enter a competition, whether to increase volume, whether to change the training plan. Taking that signal outside its frame turns a management datum into a performance claim. I was once swept up in exactly such a case during eight months of profiling a 200m athlete, and the lesson remains intact: a mark without context means nothing.

The gap between two split marks

This is the most expensive blank column. A finishing time tells you who won. It does not tell you why.

With split data, you know whether the winner ran even splits or a accelerating structure. You know which segment the runner-up collapsed in, and whether it was a speed deficit or an empty tank. You know how an athlete moving up from 800m to 1,500m handled the opening lap. I once rewatched twenty-four tapes of a men's 1,500m final to count every stride myself, and what I found was not in the time column.

When an athlete conserves through the first 800m and kicks over the final 300m, the results sheet records one line of time. The whole story — the patience, the tactical silence, the decision to strike — sits in the part that was never recorded. A results sheet closes the race, but most of the story lies beneath it.

Here I have to argue against myself

Throughout the sections above, I called for more data. But more data does not automatically produce understanding, and the sports analytics industry proves that every day.

Heat maps, movement indices, radar charts — those tools are useful, but they slide easily into a new form of divination. People look at a dark patch on a heat map and draw conclusions about an athlete's role, when the patch merely reflects where the camera was placed. Indices do not lie, but they only answer the question someone chose to ask. A beautiful heat map can completely conceal the fact that the athlete spent the entire second half out of position.

The paradox of Vietnamese athletics sits here. We lack data at the lowest layer — wind, reaction, splits — yet we risk excess conclusions at the highest layer. Adding an analytics system while three basic columns remain empty is building a second floor on bare ground.

The right direction is far cheaper than we assume. A compliant handheld wind gauge costs about as much as a few competition uniforms. Two high-speed cameras, one at the finish line and one at the 200m mark, are enough to reconstruct splits for most distances. Those things do not need a national federation's budget. They need a decision, and a person accountable for operating them across multiple seasons.

And they need one more thing: dropping the habit of publishing marks as though they stand on their own.

What to watch

Based on my experience following competitions, what separates a good athlete profile from a pretty results sheet is not the quantity of data, but knowing where to leave a blank. A sheet with an empty wind column is an honest confession: we do not know yet. A sheet with every cell filled in is usually hiding the opposite.

People remember the goals; I remember the exhausted legs after the whistle. If domestic meets agree to print one more blank column next season, that will be the biggest step forward for Vietnamese athletics in years. Are you ready to read a results sheet that admits it does not know?