Nguyen Thi Oanh and the Empty Seats on Vietnam's Women's Track

Phnom Penh, a May afternoon. The stadium lights had just come on when I sat down in the sixth row, behind the finish line, and started counting the empty spaces. The stands were not full. People were pouring toward the football pitch, where there was loud applause and flags. The 3000m steeplechase track, meanwhile, was as empty as a training session. In the far corner, a Vietnamese female athlete was warming up alone, earbuds in, eyes fixed on the ground. No one clapped when she walked to the starting line. No camera pointed at her. Ten minutes later, she crossed the line first. And then, only minutes after that, she had to prepare for another final, the 1500m. Same afternoon. Same pair of legs. I wrote a line in my notebook: there are victories that a results table will never tell in full.

That athlete was Nguyen Thi Oanh. To me, she is the clearest embodiment of a paradox that Vietnamese women's athletics has carried for years: people praise the result, but very few sit down to watch how that result was made.

To understand why an afternoon like that is worth writing about, we need to step back a little. Athletics is the foundational sport, the first lesson of every movement. But in Vietnam, it always lives in the shadow of men's football. The media pours toward matches, toward million-dollar contracts, toward naturalized stars. Athletics in general, and women's athletics in particular, appears only a few days a year, usually around the SEA Games, when gold medals are counted to meet targets.

That neglect has a historical quality. For decades, Vietnamese female athletes kept winning medals on the regional stage, kept breaking national records, but their names did not enter public memory the way a football striker's does. They are remembered as part of a delegation, rarely as an individual with a story of her own.

I have followed Vietnamese women's athletics for five years, sitting in empty stands, noting small things no one notes. What I learned is this: to understand an athletics scene, you must look at those who are absent more than those who are present. In the stands of Russia in 2026, I heard many empty seats bearing women's names. In Phnom Penh, the story was the same, except that a few more people were now sitting in those empty seats.

The structure of a SEA Games also contributes to that invisibility. Athletics is often scheduled in the early days, when attention is still spread thin. Women's events are even less likely to be prioritized for broadcast. A 3000m steeplechase runner can win gold without a single decent video of her performance. The cyclical nature of the SEA Games compresses everything: two years of preparation, a few minutes to prove it. In that span, a small injury, a coaching change, or a season cancelled by a pandemic can erase years of accumulation.

Let us talk about the craft. Nguyen Thi Oanh is not the type of athlete who owns absolute speed. She is not the fastest over the final sprint. What she has is endurance at a rare level and a head that knows how to ration effort. In an afternoon when she had to run two finals, what decided matters was not speed, but how energy was allocated between two starts. That is the hardest problem in distance running, and it is almost never told on a results table.

In the 3000m steeplechase, the technique of clearing the barrier and the water jump is the most underrated factor. Every bad landing loses a bit of energy that cannot be recovered. The best athletes in the world spend months refining their landing motion, because in a 3000m race there are seven water-jump contacts. Multiply seven times, and a small error becomes a large gap at the finish line. Oanh does not have an outstanding physical frame, so she has to compensate with technique and patience. She runs with an even rhythm, does not spend her strength early, and waits until those ahead of her begin to pay.

That is an old tactic, but executed at a distinctive level. In athletics, people often talk about the negative split, running the second half faster than the first. Oanh does this deliberately. She lets her rivals lead, observes, then accelerates at exactly the moment when her opponent's body begins to lose control. Her real strength lies in her ability to read the race, not in her legs.

Beside her, Vietnamese women's athletics has other names. Le Tu Chinh was once a hope in the sprints, with a highly rated starting technique but a career that struggled with injuries. Nguyen Thi Huyen is tied to the 400m and 400m hurdles, events that demand a balance between speed and aerobic endurance, where a hundredth of a second can be the gap between gold and nothing. Bui Thi Thu Ha brings an entirely different event: race walking, where technical discipline matters more than inspiration.

What is notable is that each of them is the product of a small ecosystem: a coach, a training center, a family behind her. Seeing the individual within the collective ecosystem is the only way to understand why some athletes shine and others disappear after a single SEA Games.

Behind every stride is a meticulously designed training cycle. A year for a track athlete is divided into phases: base conditioning, building intensity, competition, and recovery. In Vietnam, the conditions to follow that cycle properly are not always available. Nutrition, rehabilitation, and sports science remain weak areas. That makes the achievements of these female athletes all the more remarkable: they run faster than their rivals, and they also run faster than the limits the system places on them.

I still remember standing outside the warm-up area. After the final ended, when the crowd had all left, a coach sat alone on a bench, carefully writing every figure into an old notebook. No one interviewed him. No one photographed him. But it is people like him who hold an entire athletics scene upright.

This is the point I want to linger on, because it runs against how most of us think about women's sport. The familiar story is: women's sport is undervalued because of a lack of investment, a lack of spectators, a lack of sponsorship money. All true. But there is a deeper layer few touch. The absence of spectators has many sources, and money is only one part of it. It is also a consequence of how we tell stories. When a female athlete wins a medal, the media usually tells her as a symbol of national effort, not as an athlete with technique, tactics, and a style of her own. And when the story is only a symbol, the audience has no reason to sit down for the next match.

The paradox lies here: the commercial value of women's sport in Vietnam is measured by short-term indicators, the viewership of one final, the share count of one article, while its true competitive value lies in long-term things: a technique honed over years, a tactic conceived in minutes, a foundation built from the age of thirteen.

I do not believe women's sport needs to be treated like men's sport to have value. I believe the opposite: women's sport has stories that men's sport does not, and its value lies precisely in that difference. An afternoon of two finals carries a different kind of tension from an afternoon of one final. It demands a different kind of decision, and it takes a different kind of price.

There is another aspect I consider cruel and rarely discussed. When a female athlete returns from injury, the pressure to prove herself is usually greater than for her male colleagues. A contract has an expiry date, but a human story does not. Demanding that an athlete who has just recovered immediately deliver a top result helps no one; it only increases the risk of re-injury and shortens a career. For sprinters like Le Tu Chinh, every return is a gamble, and that gamble should not be staked on the impatience of outsiders.

In recent years, I have seen a small but real shift. Digital platforms allow stories about women's athletics to be told longer and deeper, instead of being compressed into a medal bulletin. Young athletes are beginning to have a voice of their own on social media. Domestic competitions, though still short on spectators, are beginning to be streamed. That change does not come from a big sponsorship deal. It comes from people who decide to sit down. A coach writing every figure into a notebook. A journalist staying 45 minutes longer after the match. A thirteen-year-old girl watching a video and deciding to try running. 45 minutes on the sidelines of the field, a lifetime that never grows old. When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices suddenly become leaders. To me, that is something that truly happened, again and again, in stands no one wants to sit in. Looking at the scoreboard, I learned to read what is not recorded. And what is not recorded in Phnom Penh, what is not recorded on any women's track in Vietnam, is the largest part of the story. The question I want to leave is not when Vietnamese women's athletics will have more spectators. The question is: when it does have more spectators, will we be patient enough to sit down and understand it, instead of just standing up to clap and walking away?