The Track Without a Crowd: Vietnamese Athletics and the Price Behind Every Medal

I. Four Fifty in the Morning

At four fifty in the morning, Hoa Xuan Stadium in Da Nang has only one floodlight still burning. Salt mist blowing in from the sea leaves a thin film of moisture on the synthetic track, and on that film I count seven shoe prints. Seven people. No spectators, no banners, no one standing at the finish line holding up a phone to record. Only the steady sound of breathing circling the four corners of the track, and the sound of footsteps striking the rubber surface like a distant drumbeat.

The fastest runner among those seven that morning, I will hold off naming. I will describe another detail first: his shoes. The outer sole is worn heavily toward the left edge, the midsole has collapsed, and on the right heel there is a V-shaped crack patched with black electrical tape. No one wears a pair of shoes like that to a national stadium. But here, at nearly five in the morning, it is the most trustworthy thing on the track.

Vietnamese athletics, a name that sounds grand, but most of its truth lives in mornings like this: no one watching, no one recording, just one person and a stretch of road that must be finished.

I have followed this profession for nearly thirty years, from my first pieces for a running magazine to tactical analysis columns at major events. I have stood at the starting line of more races than I can count, but what keeps me in this work is not the moment of crossing the finish. It is the moment before the gun fires, when everything is silent, and I know that inside each athlete's head a battle is taking place that no electronic scoreboard can display.

This article is not a results table. I have no intention of listing medals and records like a dry report. I want to talk about the price. About shoes patched with tape, about handwritten diaries, about the nights an athlete calls me at eleven o'clock just to ask a question they do not dare voice during the day: whether they should quit.

II. The Two Worlds of Vietnamese Athletics

Over roughly the past fifteen years, Vietnam has witnessed a running boom unlike anything before. Marathons have sprung up across provinces and cities, from Da Nang, Ha Long, and Quy Nhon to Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Each season, tens of thousands register, bringing heart-rate monitors, carbon-plated shoes, event-branded singlets, and a spirit I have to admit is beautiful. Running has become a social ritual, a way for people to prove to themselves that they still have strength, still have discipline, still have something that has not been swept away by the grind of work.

But there is something I have observed over many years, and it troubles me: the mass running movement and Vietnam's elite athletics almost exist in two different worlds. On one side are hundreds of thousands of people running for health, for their social image, for a moment captured on social media. On the other side are a few hundred professional athletes, most from poor provinces, training under conditions that, if described to a European athlete, they would not believe.

That gap is not only a gap in performance. It is a gap in how people perceive the value of an athlete. At mass events, people celebrate the crowd, celebrate participation, celebrate personal effort shared online. On the elite track, value is measured in seconds and centimetres, and once you step onto it, you are judged by a number that you may spend your entire youth trying to improve, yet are not always rewarded for.

I once spoke with a veteran coach at a national training centre. He told me about a group of young athletes having to share a few pairs of shoes to train, about competition kits borrowed from one another, about how a training camp abroad was a dream most of them knew they would never touch. Those stories do not appear on television. They exist only in the tea breaks after sessions, when people are honest with each other.

I do not tell this to make the story tragic. I tell it because it is true, and because if I do not, readers will only see the tip of the iceberg: the gleaming medals at the SEA Games, the celebratory headlines, the heroic moments. The submerged part, far larger, is the people running at four fifty in the morning in a stadium with no crowd.

There is one thing I learned very early, from the years when I was a young writer at Runner's World: a piece only touches the truth when it dares to follow a person all the way to where they live, to where they train. There is no such thing as athletic truth in the stands. The truth is on the sand, on the slope, on a village road no one bothers to name.

III. Dissecting a Track

Athletics is the only sport where you cannot lie. You can hide your form in football, you can mask a decline with collective tactics, but on the track you cannot. The clock will speak for you, and it does not know how to be gentle.

That is why I chose athletics as my profession. It is the sport of cruel honesty.

When analysing a race, I always start with the metrics outsiders overlook. In middle- and long-distance running, three things form the foundation. First is the lactate threshold, the point at which the body begins accumulating lactic acid faster than it can clear it. Second is VO2max, the maximum rate at which the body can absorb and use oxygen. Third is running economy, the amount of oxygen consumed per kilogram of body weight per kilometre. An athlete can have a high VO2max and still lose to someone with a lower one, if the latter has better running economy. This explains why training more does not always mean running faster. Training correctly matters more.

Over many years, I have recognised a systemic problem in Vietnamese athletics: people focus too much on running a lot, and care too little about running correctly. I once watched a young athlete slog through three long runs a week, plus speed sessions, plus strength work, to the point where the body never had time to regenerate. The result was an Achilles tendon injury, then plantar fasciitis, then a career shorter than it deserved.

The principle of periodisation, dividing the training year into phases with different objectives, is something many young Vietnamese coaches know in theory but struggle to apply in practice. Why? Because the domestic competition calendar is dense, because performance targets at youth events are set too early, because a seventeen-year-old is already required to win a medal that very year. When immediate results override long-term vision, the human body becomes the first thing traded away.

I remember an afternoon at a training centre, sitting beside a female athlete as she wrapped her ankle. She said something I wrote down immediately: "I am not afraid of pain. What I fear most is running forever and no one knowing what I gave up." That sentence has stayed with me my whole career. It reminds me that behind every performance number is a person with a very concrete fear, not an abstract fear of failure, but the fear of being forgotten.

Tactics in distance running are far more complex than simply running as fast as possible. It is a problem of energy distribution, of reading opponents, and of accepting that sometimes the runner who goes slower early is the one who finishes first.

The concept of a negative split, running the second half faster than the first, is the mark of an athlete with a solid base and good control. Conversely, the "all-out from the start" style is a trap that many young Vietnamese athletes fall into, especially at domestic events, where the pressure to lead from the first metres makes them burn all their fuel before the race truly begins.

At a national championship a few years ago, I sat in the stands watching a women's 5,000 metres. One athlete ran in fourth place almost the entire race. She did not try to surge, did not react when she was dropped, only held a steady rhythm. In the penultimate lap, as the two leaders began wrestling with their own fatigue, she accelerated. Not a spectacular sprint, but a measured, certain acceleration, as if she knew exactly how much was left in the tank. She won. Afterwards, when I asked her secret, she simply said: "I run by feel, not by following others."

That answer sounds simple, but it contains an entire philosophy of competition. It is exactly what I wrote in my analysis of Croatia at the 2026 World Cup, when I noticed their midfielder repeatedly dropping between the two centre-backs to circulate the ball, a detail no commentator mentioned. I called it "control by conceding control". And I still hold that view: sometimes the strongest form of control is the one that looks like yielding. In running, the same applies. The person who is not leading is not necessarily losing. The person who is not leading may be the one who understands the race best.

The white night in Russia taught me that the best game is the game no one expects. I carried that lesson from football into athletics, and it holds true in both.

IV. The Diary and the Man Without a Medal

In 2026, at the age of thirty-five, I did something many colleagues considered a waste of time. At a marathon in Da Nang, instead of staying for the awards ceremony to photograph the winners, I quietly followed a ninth-place finisher named Le Van Tuan, twenty-three years old, all the way back to Lien Chieu district.

Tuan had nothing remarkable about him. He won no medal, gave no interviews, had no sponsor. But I noticed him mid-race, because of how he ran. No show, no attempt to overtake anyone, just steady. After the race ended, I asked him the question I always ask those who do not finish in glory: what keeps you on the track?

Tuan took me home. A small rented room, hot, with an old standing fan. There, he pulled out a thick stack of notebooks. It was his running diary, written over five years, more than one thousand eight hundred pages. One line a day, recording distance, feeling, weather, sometimes just a short sentence like "legs heavy today, but I ran anyway". I read the first few dozen pages and felt as if I were reading the diary of a person living on another planet, where a human being's value is measured by whether they keep the promise they made to themselves.

I wrote the piece "The Endurance Runner Who Needs No Finish Line", about two thousand five hundred words. It was shared more than twelve thousand times. And what moved me most: a year later, Tuan won the national championship. Not because of my article, but because he had quietly prepared for that moment for five years, while I was merely someone who happened to pass by and record it.

Tuan's story changed how I write. From then on, I abandoned the results-driven approach. I began digging into the margins: diaries, equipment, training habits, things no one notices but where the truth resides. An athlete is not defined by the medal they win, but by what they gave up to stand at the starting line.

A record is only a shadow; the person is the track.

In this profession, I have learned that the most valuable moment is not when an athlete raises their arms in celebration, but when they sit down, take off their shoes, and talk about what they have had to endure. My heroes never lift a trophy; they only whisper to the grass of the arena.

V. The Price That Never Appears on the Standings

When I analyse an athlete's career, I always try to trace the price. Success in sport is never a destination. It is a debt, and that debt is paid with things outsiders never see.

I once interviewed a female long jumper. She told me about how her mother died while she was training abroad for an important event, and how she decided not to return. She told me it was the hardest decision of her life, and that she still has not forgiven herself. Then she added a sentence I have never forgotten: "I jump to forget. But every time I land, I remember."

The price of elite sport is not sweat. Sweat is the easiest thing to tell, the easiest to sell. The real price is relationships torn apart, lonely evenings in the training hall, years of youth wagered on a goal whose odds of success are far lower than studying for another profession. The price is a pair of shoes patched with black electrical tape, and a person who knows they will never be recognised for what they gave up.

There are athletes who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory.

I think of them whenever I read a results bulletin. Because behind every number is a person who had to cut away a part of their life. And the question I always ask is not how fast they ran, but how much they had to pay to run that way.

VI. Why Vietnamese Athletics Is Still Far From the Finish

I will say plainly what many in the profession think but few say openly: Vietnamese athletics is stuck between two incompatible goals. On one hand, we want international results, medals on continental and world stages. On the other, our training system still relies mainly on maximising a few exceptional individuals, rather than building a broad and sustainable base.

Look at the structure. In countries with strong athletics, a young athlete has access to sports science very early: motion analysis, personalised nutrition, periodic physiological testing, recovery with specialised equipment. They have a competition system designed for gradual development, not for burning stages. In Vietnam, most of that remains the privilege of a very small number of national-team athletes.

The biggest gap is in the transition phase. After finishing high school, a young athlete has two paths: join the national team and pursue the sport, or leave athletics to make a living. There are few intermediate zones, few opportunities to keep training while also holding a stable job. This causes some talented athletes to be lost simply because they cannot make a living from sport.

I remember a conversation with a former athlete who once won a medal at a regional event. He told me that after retiring, he taught physical education at a school, and felt as though he had been erased from the industry's memory. "People only remember you while you are still running," he said. "When you stop, you disappear." That is a truth no results table can reflect.

VII. The Counterintuitive Angle: A Running Boom Does Not Produce Champions

This is what I want to make clear, even if it may offend some: the mass running boom in Vietnam, however welcome socially, contributes almost nothing directly to elite athletics performance. The two are different ecosystems, operating on different logic, and conflating them is a common mistake.

A recreational runner runs a marathon to finish, to overcome personal limits, to have an experience. An elite athlete runs to win, and to do that, they must accept a level of suffering and monotony a recreational runner never touches. A recreational runner can run a marathon in four hours and feel happy. An elite athlete can run twice as fast and still feel like a failure, because they did not meet their target.

What worries me is that when the running boom explodes, people easily mistake it for a strong athletics base. But the number of runners does not equal the quality of elite athletes. A country can have hundreds of thousands of marathon runners each year and still not have a single athlete capable of competing at an Olympic Games. That is an uncomfortable truth, but it needs to be said.

The second counterintuitive point: focusing too much on short-term results, on having a medal at every event, may be destroying the very athletes we want to protect. An athlete pushed to the top too early hits a ceiling very quickly, and once they hit it, they lack the foundation to keep developing. We have seen no small number of such cases: prodigies of one moment, then gone when youth fades.

Athletics and human life are alike in one respect: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right path.

The biggest mistake is not running slowly. The biggest mistake is running fast on the wrong road, and realising it when it is too late.

VIII. The Caller at Eleven at Night

I learned to listen from late-night calls, when athletes say what they do not dare say in daylight.

These are calls people make not to seek advice, but to hear a voice that does not judge. One athlete called me after a failure at an important event, and her first words were: "Please don't write anything about me this time." I did not write. But I sat and listened to her for two hours, about how she had trained, about what her coach had said to her, about how she felt she had betrayed everyone who believed in her.

I did not tell her everything would be fine. I did not say failure is part of success. Those are clichés people say to reassure themselves, not to genuinely help. I only listened. And at the end of the call, she said something I think was the truest thing that night: "I don't need anyone to tell me I'm okay. I just need someone to know that I tried."

That is what I believe sports journalism must do. Not to glorify victory, not to condemn defeat, but to witness. To be there, at eleven at night, when no one is watching, and to record that a person tried.

IX. Rebirth Through Despair

What draws me most in sport is not the winners. It is those who failed in a way that seemed final, and then found a new form of life.

I once followed an athlete who dropped out mid-race at a major event. She fell at the eight-hundred-metre mark and could not continue. In the stands, people whispered, some disappointed, some pitying. But two years later, she returned, not as a competing athlete, but as a coach of a group of young athletes. She told me that fall had taught her she was not only a runner. She was someone who could pass on what she had learned.

That rebirth does not appear on any results table. But it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. Because it shows that an athletic career does not end when the athlete leaves the track. It only shifts into another form.

I think about this whenever I see a young athlete fail. I do not see them as people out of chances. I see them as people at the start of another journey they may not yet recognise. Because in sport, as in life, failure is not a full stop. It is a comma, and sometimes the most important comma of all.

X. About Those Taped Shoes

I return to the image at the start: seven shoe prints on a wet track, and a pair of shoes with a V-shaped crack patched with black electrical tape.

The person wearing those shoes, I still have not named. His name is Hung, nineteen years old, from a mountainous district. He is not a prodigy. He may never win a medal at an international event. But he is the reason I still write about athletics after nearly thirty years.

Because when I watched him run in that crowdless morning, I saw what I am always searching for in sport: a person trying to overcome themselves, not for anyone, not for a medal, but only because it is the one thing they know how to do to feel alive.

Sport, at its deepest level, is not a contest. It is a language. A language anyone, anywhere, can speak without learning it. When a person runs, they are telling the world they exist, that they are trying, that they are not surrendering. And when another person witnesses it, they understand, without needing an explanation.

That is why I believe athletics, the most basic and most underrated sport, is the one that says the most about human beings. Because it does not let you hide behind teammates, does not let you blame tactics, does not let you conceal yourself behind a collective result. It is only you, the distance, and the clock. And in that bare space, your truest self appears.

XI. What I Want to Leave Behind

I write this at the start of a regular season, when domestic events are preparing to begin, when athletes are entering their base-training phase, when questions of form, fitness, and tactics still have no answers. This is the moment when the truth has not yet been written, and it is the moment I love most.

I want readers, when watching a race, to try to look beyond the scoreboard. To look at how an athlete distributes their energy, how they react when overtaken, how they hold their rhythm when everything around them is collapsing. To look at their shoes. And to remember that behind every number is a person who had to give up a great deal to be at the starting line.

I do not write to make sport more tragic. I write to make it truer. Because a sport built only on moments of glory will collapse easily. A sport built on the truth about people, on crowdless mornings, on taped shoes, on calls at eleven at night, is the one that can last.

If you ask me whether Vietnamese athletics has a future, I will not answer with numbers. I will tell you about seven people running in a stadium at four fifty in the morning, and I will say the future is there, in those who keep running even when no one is watching.

Because in the end, what makes a sport is not the winners, but those who do not give up.

And if there is one thing I want you to carry away after reading this piece, it is this: next time, when you watch a race and see an athlete finish in silence, no medal, no applause, remember that this person may have paid a price you will never see on the standings. Remember that a record is only a shadow, and the person is the track. Remember that there are athletes who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in the memory of those who witnessed them.

And if you are an athlete reading these lines, on a morning no one is watching, on a road no one has named, know that I am here, recording. Not to glorify you, but to witness you. Because in the world of athletics, where everything is measured in seconds and centimetres, the most precious thing is the one that cannot be measured: the perseverance of a person against a long distance.

I have spent nearly thirty years writing about people like that. And I still believe it is the most meaningful work I could do. Not to tell you who won, but to tell you who tried. Because in a mature sport, people do not only remember those who lift the trophy. They remember all those who once stood at the starting line, and chose to step forward.

That is what I believe. That is what I write. And that is what I hope you carry with you into a new season, where everything is still possible, where stories have not yet been written, and where people are still running, quietly, in the early morning, waiting for a day the world will see them. But whether the world sees them or not, they still run. And that, precisely, is the most beautiful thing about sport.