Asiad 20 Closes: Vietnam's Athletics and the Void in the Medal Table

On the closing night of Asiad 20 in Aichi-Nagoya (Japan), I sat alone in my small studio in Saigon. The screen was still lit when the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) announced the Games' best athletes: USD 25,000 each, judged on gold medals plus world, Asian or Games records. Not a single Vietnamese name was on that list. What kept me sitting there was not the missing medal but a line in the pre-Games plan: athletics was among seven sports expected to win gold, alongside shooting, sepak takraw, rowing, karate, taekwondo and esports. Seven sports, a four-gold target, and in the end only two sports carried the load. People saw a medal table; I saw lives running down a track that no one names.

Vietnam's delegation arrived in Aichi-Nagoya with 348 athletes and a target of four gold medals. That figure, according to many in the field, was modest given the size of the contingent. When the Games closed after two weeks, the team returned home with three golds, three silvers and nineteen bronzes, ranked 19th on the medal table. The two sports that delivered gold were sepak takraw and karate — the very same sports that shouldered this responsibility at the previous Games. On the other side, China dominated with 169 golds, 89 silvers and 83 bronzes.

To someone who has followed athletics for nearly half a century, this gap is not surprising but it still stings. Athletics carries the largest pool of medals in the Olympic and Asian Games systems. It is also where most records are concentrated — precisely what the OCA's selection criteria aim at. If athletics produces no gold, the door into the Games' best-athlete group closes for almost any delegation.

The real story lies in the structure. Among the seven expected gold sports, athletics and rowing are two with long training cycles that demand investment in infrastructure and deep coaching staffs. Shooting and karate, by contrast, are decided "in a single moment" — an athlete peaking for one session can bring home gold. When a delegation pours resources into the second group, it harvests that group and loses the first. Golds arriving from the same two sports in two consecutive editions, while development sports produce none, reveal a narrow medal base rather than a comprehensive sports program. This is not a sentimental guess; it is the direct consequence of how resources are allocated.

Looking at China, the contrast is one of coverage. Its 169 golds span many sports, with athletics and swimming contributing the largest share. Japan, South Korea and India also build athletics strength as a pillar. Vietnam, with three golds and nineteen bronzes, shows a very different pattern: it reaches the edge of the podium many times but rarely converts to gold. Nineteen bronzes is a notable figure, yet it also says the team competed in enough finals, enough top-three finishes, while lacking the final leap.

I once spent three months persuading striker Huynh Nhu to sit before the microphone, and the lesson I took away had nothing to do with any medal. She talked about a childhood selling lottery tickets to buy football boots. The pitch taught me that some lessons are never refused. Vietnam's athletics today is the same — athletes still step onto the track, still run, still jump, even when the golden podium has not called their names. Every time they touch the finish line, a prejudice breaks. The problem is not a lack of effort but a system that has not nurtured them thickly enough.

The usual framing easily leads us astray. People say the four-gold target was "modest and still missed," then attribute it all to weak preparation. But look at the OCA's selection mechanism and a different logic appears: the USD 25,000 best-athlete award is designed around records, and records are almost always born in athletics and swimming. That means a delegation's media value is not proportional to its medal count but to whether it reaches the "record-producing" sports. A single athletics gold carries far more symbolic weight than a gold in a sport few people watch.

Vietnam's problem, then, is not only a shortage of gold. It is that resources are pushed toward what yields quick and cheap results instead of toward what creates lasting value. Sponsors and governing bodies look at the medal table to decide allocation — a loop that keeps development sports underfunded, and underfunding keeps them without gold. What is needed is a fair audit: who benefits from the athletes' sweat, and who pays the price for the system's impatience?

The Games have closed, but Vietnam's athletics story is only starting a new cycle. I am old now, but each time I see a young athlete step onto the track, I feel young again. What is needed now is not a promise of medals but an investment commitment long enough that the next generation does not have to sell lottery tickets to buy boots. When athletics is treated as a pillar rather than a scoring target, that is when the medal table will begin to tell the real story.