The Empty Scale on Vietnam's Martial Arts Arenas

On an April morning at the Quy Nhon Sports Hall, a nineteen-year-old martial arts student sat with his knees pulled to his chest in a corridor corner. Red shirt, hands wrapped in frayed cloth tape, eyes fixed on the sheet listing the order of competition. Nobody weighed him. Nobody asked what he ate last night or how much water he drank this morning. In thirty minutes he would step onto the form mat; an hour later he would enter the sparring ring in a weight class the organisers had recorded from his own word.

I have stood in that corridor across four seasons. Every season there is an A4 sheet taped to a pillar, every season someone writes the weight class in ballpoint pen. No electronic scale, no hydration log, no doctor's signature. Fifteen kilometres away, in a professional boxing gym in Da Nang, people weigh by the ounce and measure body fat by the percentage point. Vietnam's two martial arts worlds sit very close on the map and very far apart in how they do the job.

Sitting in the stands in Moscow, I learned to listen with my eyes and see with my ears. There, before every bout, the organiser publishes the weight, publishes the missed weight, publishes the post-fight medical suspension list. Those items belong to no single federation. They belong to the people in the seats.

In Vietnam, martial arts run on several tracks. Traditional martial arts have their own festival and competition circuit run by the culture and sports sector and provincial federations. Sanda, boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling sit inside the high-performance sports system. Professional MMA follows a commercial path through promotions such as LION Championship. Each track has its own rulebook, its own scoring method, and a very different level of transparency.

The distance between those tracks is not about money. It is about who is allowed to certify a fact.

For years I wrote about Vietnamese martial arts using borrowed professional boxing vocabulary: form, head-to-head record, knockout rate, unbeaten streak. It sounded very sporty. It was also very wrong when applied to a three-minute form routine scored on movement difficulty and quality of execution.

Three logics coexist under one word, "vo": performance, combat and ritual. Folding them into a single yardstick is wrong at the root, and that root error is hiding very concrete risks for the people who train.

A form routine has no opponent. It has no overtime, no scoring blows, no one counting strikes to the head. Form athletes are measured by the precision of the rotation axis, the tension in the stance, the breath at the finish. A win-loss table cannot measure any of that. When I read a report describing a form athlete as "in high form after three straight wins", I know the writer has never stood at the judges' table.

The confusion does not stop at wording. It flows down onto the training floor. Coaches at small gyms start pushing students to train on combat logic - more muscle mass, less fat, higher intensity - while the discipline those students pursue is scored on an entirely different set of criteria. Then competition day arrives, and they stand on the mat with the body of a fighter and the technique of someone who has not had enough time on the form.

The heavier consequence sits in the dark zone of the data.

In professional combat events, the scale is part of the contract and part of the medical file. The weigh-in result is published, the allowance is published, and if a fighter misses weight, the promoter has an obligation to say so. At most amateur and semi-professional events in Vietnam, that scale does not exist in any document.

Without public weigh-in data, an unbeaten record becomes a number that cannot be verified. A young boxer with twelve wins may have faced twelve opponents six months into training, or twelve real opponents in his own weight class. The audience has no way to tell. I once sat with a coach in central Vietnam who told me he had to phone colleagues in other provinces to ask how much his student's opponent weighed. That was the only method. There is no database to search.

The most dangerous element is the water cut. Young Vietnamese fighters are typically eighteen to twenty-two, still growing. To make weight they drop three to five kilograms in twenty-four hours by restricting fluids, running in raincoats, sitting in steam. It happens where there is no sports physician, no electrolyte test, no one taking a heart rate before they step onto the mat. Acute kidney injury, rhabdomyolysis, collapse at the scale - those events never appear in the news, because no news outlet records them.

The stories of those who reached the top - Nguyễn Trần Duy Nhất on the Muay stage, Trương Đình Hoàng with a WBA Asia belt - mostly revolve around maintaining body weight after the peak has passed. Nguyễn Thị Tâm walked to the Tokyo 2026 Olympics inside a strict weight-class system where the number on the scale became a document. The kids below have no document. That does not mean they are safer. It means nobody writes it down.

During the pandemic the stadiums were silent, and I had never heard the hearts of the fans so clearly. That day I sat in a gym in Da Nang recording supporters' voices to play back for fighters during closed sessions. One boy asked me: "Uncle, when do I get a real fight?" I could not answer, because a real fight depends on an event, the event depends on a licence, and the licence depends on a medical file nobody has opened.

A transfer is not a set of numbers. It is a separation written into a contract. And in Vietnamese martial arts, most of those separations have no witness.

When something goes wrong, the reflex is to point at the ring: a slippery canvas, loose ropes, an inexperienced referee. None of that is false. It just aims at the end of the chain.

The real break is at classification and record-keeping: a federation that does not know exactly which discipline it governs cannot know what it must protect fighters from. To have a weigh-in rule, you must first accept that weight class is part of the law. To have a medical suspension list, you must first accept that a strike to the head accumulates value over time.

And there I often hear a defence: standardisation will kill the soul of traditional martial arts, that ancestral techniques cannot be boxed in by a weigh-in slip and a medical form. I understand the feeling, and I respect those who hold it. But it must be said plainly: that argument is currently serving as a shield for administrative failure, not for the spirit of the martial way. Nobody loses the soul of a form routine because a doctor stands beside the mat with a blood-pressure cuff. Conversely, a nineteen-year-old who collapses in a corridor can lose everything.

There is one more misconception: nobody caught doping means a clean environment. In a system with no regular testing, no biological passport, no published results, silence is not evidence of innocence. It is only silence.

The next signal I am waiting for is not a big fight. I am waiting for the first document from a Vietnamese federation publishing three things: actual competition weight, the post-event medical suspension list, and a separate scoring standard for form routines. The day a federation prints that sheet, Vietnamese martial arts will begin to have a memory. Until then, every young fighter writes his own file from someone else's recollection.