The Notebook at the Poolside: Why Vietnamese Swimming Has Lost Its Own Data

It took me forty minutes to answer a question that should have been simple: what is Vietnam's national record in the men's 200m individual medley, in seconds, set at which meet, on what date, in a long course or short course pool. Three websites gave me three different timings and two different names. None listed the date of the swim. None listed the pool type. In the end I had to call a coach in Quang Binh, a man who had stood at the poolside at a youth meet a decade ago, and he had to open a paper notebook so we could confirm it together.

That afternoon I sat for a long time with my own notebook, the one I use to log every lap, every breath, every push off the wall of young swimmers. One thing made my blood run cold: Vietnamese swimming has results, but it has almost no data. A result is a scoreboard hung up and then taken down. Data is what stays, so that twenty years later people can still read it and understand why a swimmer is fast, and how they got faster.

Nguyen Thi Anh Vien retired in 2026, closing a decade in which Vietnamese swimming had a star significant enough that the whole region had to account for her. The girl from Can Tho left behind a pile of SEA Games medals and appearances at London 2026 and Rio 2026 — the nights when Vietnamese audiences first learned what it felt like to stay up watching swimming heats.

Nguyen Huy Hoang carried on. His silver medal at the 2026 Asian Games in the 1500m freestyle lifted him to a level very few Vietnamese swimmers have touched. Then Tran Hung Nguyen, Pham Thanh Bao and Vo Thi My Tien followed one another through Olympic cycles, carrying just enough expectation that nobody dared say it out loud.

This is a transition from a one-star model to a model of several athletes at once. In quantity, that is progress. In quality, the story sits exactly where I ran into it that afternoon in Nha Trang.

Look at the big stage to see what the gap is measured in. At Paris 2026, every final at La Defense Arena was published with 50m splits, reaction times and underwater distances after each turn. Pan Zhanle set a world record of 46.40 seconds in the 100m freestyle. Bobby Finke broke the 1500m freestyle world record in 14 minutes 30.67 seconds. Leon Marchand swam the 400m individual medley in 4 minutes 02.95 seconds. Every time a record falls, there is immediately a detailed map showing exactly what percentage of a second that swimmer gained in which segment.

In Vietnam, we know how long Nguyen Huy Hoang took to swim 1500m. We do not know whether he lost time in the 400m segment or the 1200m segment.

That gap is no small matter. In swimming, a single line of 50m splits answers many things. It tells a coach whether a swimmer started too fast or distributed energy badly, tells a sports scientist where the lactate threshold sits, and tells an administrator whether an Olympic slot is genuinely achievable or merely a media dream.

Without splits, people are forced to judge by eye. And the eye lies very convincingly. I once spent an entire evening with a stopwatch counting Federico Chiesa's presses in a Euro match, and the number I counted was well above my initial impression. I mention that not to show off the notebook, but to say this: pressing data does not lie, but it does whisper the name of a star who is still asleep. Swimming is the same. There are Vietnamese swimmers performing better than even their own coaches believe, simply because nobody has bothered to time them carefully enough.

Consider short course and long course, a technical detail Vietnamese media almost always skips. A record set in a 25m pool cannot be placed beside one set in a 50m pool, because a short course pool gives a swimmer nearly twice as many turns — and every turn is a free burst of speed. Over the same 200m, with the same swimmer, the difference between the two pool types can reach several seconds. When a page lists a "national record" without listing the pool type, that line is meaningless in technical terms.

There is another layer few notice: the 15-metre rule. After the start and after each turn, a swimmer may travel underwater for a maximum of 15 metres. That is where the leading swimming nations are winning. Swimmers like Marchand and Finke can push their underwater phase right up to the 15m mark, and every time they do, they leave their rivals' stroke range behind. To judge whether an athlete can reach continental level, you have to measure their underwater distance, not just their total time.

I built tables for several Vietnamese swimmers by sitting at the poolside in Nha Trang, timing every 5 metres, recording the number of dolphin kicks in the underwater phase and the stroke rate in each 50m. This does not require expensive equipment. It requires a stopwatch, a notebook and the patience of a craftsman. The problem is that we rarely turn that into a habit across the whole system.

The first consequence is that young athletes are judged on total time rather than on the structure of their race. A kid swimming the 400m individual medley with an excellent butterfly leg but a collapse in the breaststroke leg gets filed under "not good enough yet", when in fact they need dedicated breaststroke work while continuing to develop the butterfly. To know that, you need splits.

The second consequence is that investment decisions are made on feeling. A training centre opens, a specialist is hired, but nobody has a baseline to say whether it worked. Three years later, people are still arguing the same arguments.

The third consequence, and perhaps the heaviest, is that memory is erased. This generation of swimmers cannot compare itself with the previous one, because the previous generation's data sits scattered in paper notebooks, in the memories of a few older coaches, and in television reports that have been deleted from the archive. A sport without memory forces every generation to start over.

Here I want to return to a personal aside I always carry with me. From one mispronunciation in the middle of a World Cup, I understood that football does not begin with the foot, but with the ear. I say that not to compare two sports, but to point at a shared principle: everything begins with calling things by their right names. Calling players by their right names, calling matches by their right names, and in swimming, calling every lap by its right name. A swimming nation that cannot name its own laps will forever trade in sentiment rather than analysis.

This leads me to a counterintuitive point I want to state plainly. When people talk about Vietnamese swimming, almost everyone immediately agrees that we lack pools and lack money. That is not wrong. The number of 50m pools with proper lanes, electronic timing and a real recovery room can be counted on one hand. But if we have money and pools without a recording system, every medal remains a product of individual luck rather than a repeatable process.

The blind spot of Vietnamese swimming lies in memory, not in the water. We are racing the region on inspiration, while our direct rivals — Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia — finished building national performance databases long ago. Every time we lose by one hundredth of a second, hardly anyone can trace where that hundredth went.

Another counterpoint is worth raising. Our competition system unintentionally creates a habit of spreading swimmers thin: a young athlete is entered in many events at a single SEA Games to maximise medal chances. That approach makes sense for the medal table, but it means the swimmer never goes deep in one event, and it turns the data set into confetti. World swimming runs the other way: specialise in one layer, then expand from there. The world's leading 200m medley swimmers do not swim the 50m butterfly just to collect another medal. They swim the 200m butterfly to create a different physical load for their main event.

I run like an athlete, I jump between sports like an adrenaline addict, and in every one of those jumps I meet the same problem: people lack data about themselves. Vietnamese swimming needs something very concrete: an open national database, standardised to international format, where every record carries a date, a meet, a pool type and a full set of 50m splits. That costs less than a training camp abroad, and it holds its value far longer. It turns a child's session in Quang Binh into a data point comparable with the whole continent.

Every sport is its own universe, and I am lucky to be a traveller between those orbits. But in swimming, the orbit is only visible when someone bothers to write it down.

There is one question I still ask myself after every session at the poolside with a notebook in hand: if ten years from now a girl in Can Tho opens her laptop and cannot find Nguyen Thi Anh Vien's record with a detailed race breakdown, then what she inherits is not a swimming nation, but an unverifiable legend. Legends inspire, but they do not teach anyone how to swim one hundredth of a second faster. We can start that record-keeping this very off-season — it only takes one person to open the notebook first.