The Empty Spreadsheet on the Lane: What Vietnamese Swimming Still Refuses to Measure

The Empty Spreadsheet on the Lane: What Vietnamese Swimming Still Refuses to Measure

Eleven at night, the cafe on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street had stacked its chairs. I stayed behind with an Excel file open on my second screen. Inside it was a forty-page swimming analysis report — complete with room for everything: technical assessment, performance benchmarking, opponent mapping, doping risk, career curve, industry ripple effects. Every cell was empty.

Not empty in the way someone forgets to fill in. Empty deliberately: each row marked "insufficient information," each cell marked "cannot assess." The report was confessing that it had nothing to say, because nothing had been put into it.

I closed the laptop. Then opened it again. Something about that blank grid made me think about more than fifteen years of watching Vietnamese lanes — a swimming nation that has produced medals, national records and teenage heroes hyped by the press, but almost no data deep enough for an outsider to verify.

Numbers do not lie, but they know how to hide something. The trouble here is that we don't yet have any numbers for them to hide.

A Medal Is an Outcome, Not Data

I entered the trade in 2026 as a swimming reporter. Back then, working a domestic meet was simple: show up, copy the finish times off the electronic board, interview the coach, file. The scoreboard was the only data source, and it told exactly one thing — the final time.

Fourteen years later, I still receive results with the identical structure. No splits. No reaction time. No turn time. No stroke count. One final number and one ranking.

That is not wrong administratively. It is wrong professionally. A sport that only measures outcomes will always be able to explain a result after it happens, and almost never be able to predict one.

Take a simple case I once encountered. A young swimmer finished two seconds off her personal best in the 200m individual medley. The popular read: "she ran out of gas today." The split-based read: first 50m faster than her PB by 0.6 seconds, second 50m faster by 0.4, third 50m slower by 1.8, final 50m slower by 1.2. Two laps of over-excitement, two laps of paying for it. That is a pacing error, not a fitness error. Two diagnoses, two completely different training prescriptions.

But to reach the second diagnosis, I need what the scoreboard does not provide. At domestic meets I often end up timing splits myself with a stopwatch from the stands, sitting at an oblique angle, with an error margin of three to four tenths of a second. That is an error margin large enough to invalidate the entire analysis. You cannot discuss pacing when your measurement is coarser than the phenomenon you are measuring.

How a Lane Is Actually Read

To grasp the thickness of what is missing, walk through the layers a single race can generate.

The first layer is reaction time, measured from the starting signal to the toes leaving the block. In the 50m and 100m events, this is the largest non-stroke variable. A swimmer reacting in 0.62 seconds against one at 0.74 has twelve hundredths of a second banked before touching the water — over 50 metres, that is essentially the entire gap between a medal and a heat exit.

The second layer is the underwater phase after the start: number of dolphin kicks, amplitude, and breakthrough point. This is the most misunderstood segment in amateur coaching. People assume underwater is a rest. The opposite is true: underwater is the fastest part of the lane, because there is no surface wave drag. Losing one dolphin kick here means buying it back with muscle on the surface.

The third layer is turn time — hand touching the wall to feet leaving it. In a 50m pool, a 200m race contains only three turns. In a 25m pool, it contains seven. This is why turning, a minor detail in long-course distance events, becomes decisive in short-course racing.

The fourth layer is stroke count per length and stroke rate per minute. Combined with distance per stroke, these two reveal the true efficiency picture. A swimmer taking 42 strokes per 50m length is swimming a very different race from one taking 34, even if they touch the wall at the same time. The first is compensating with frequency; the second with force per cycle. Their development curves over the next three years will not look alike.

The fifth layer, and the most neglected: race-to-race variance. A swimmer whose 200m IM varies by 0.3 seconds between heats and final has a stable technical base. One who varies by two seconds does not, and their best time reflects probability rather than capability.

Five layers of data. At most domestic meets, we have exactly one: the final time.

Stroke Length, Stroke Rate, and the Cost of Counting Only Distance

There is a temptation that repeats across almost every small sporting nation: measuring what is easy to measure instead of what matters.

In swimming, the easy things are height, arm span, and metres covered in training. The thing that matters is the efficiency of converting propulsive force into speed — what percentage of the hand's pull actually becomes forward motion, and what percentage is lost pushing water sideways and creating turbulence behind the body.

That efficiency figure does not appear on a scoreboard. It appears only when someone sits down with video, counts frames and cross-references them against real time. That is time-consuming work requiring equipment and generating no media glamour. So it slides to the bottom of the priority list.

That summer in Saigon, I learned that data also needs watering. A data source does not grow by itself. It needs someone to prune it, sort it, and — most importantly — read it honestly, even when it says the opposite of what you want to hear.

Vietnam has a large volume of swimming data sitting in unwatered form: age-group result files, championship video recordings, training logs from regional centres. These things do not disappear. They simply sit there, unstandardised, undigitised, uncross-checked.

25 Metres and 50 Metres: Two Different Sports

One technical point deserves its own section, because it is the source of many domestic misconceptions.

Racing in a 25m pool and racing in a 50m pool are not the same sport at two lengths. They are two events with different energy structures.

A 25m pool doubles the number of turns, and every turn lets a swimmer leave the wall on a push-off faster than their own swimming speed. That is why every short-course record is faster than its long-course counterpart, and the gap in distance events is not small.

The practical consequence is blunt: a strong short-course result does not convert linearly to long course. Swimmers whose strength lies in wall push-offs or in sprint mechanics gain artificial advantage in short course. Move them to long course and that advantage evaporates, exposing the real quality — the ability to hold pace in open water over distance.

When vetting an athlete's profile, I always ask one question first: what pool length was this standout result swum in? The answer usually determines how credible the whole profile is. Olympic, Paralympic and world championship standards are long course. A profile listing only short-course results with no conversion reference is an incomplete profile.

This sounds like a nitpick. It is not. Many inflated expectations around young swimmers trace back to exactly one thing: comparing a short-course time against someone else's long-course time, then concluding the swimmer is "close to the international standard."

The World Map and the Talent Supply Chain

To know where a small swimming nation stands, you need to know which horizon it is looking at. And that horizon shifts by event group.

In men's sprint freestyle, the 100m has recently seen the ceiling pushed below the 46.5-second mark at world level. In the 800m and 1500m freestyle, the picture is far more stable: a handful of American and European figures have held position across multiple Olympic cycles, and the gap between the leading group and the rest remains very wide.

In individual medley, talent tends to cluster: a nation will hold all three of the 200m and 400m medley events almost simultaneously, thanks to a specific training centre capable of transmitting the transition skill across four strokes. That is clustered technical transfer, not an individual phenomenon.

Backstroke and butterfly show similar concentration. Breaststroke cycles run shorter — records fall and are reclaimed more often, reflecting a higher rate of technical competition.

Two things stand out for a nation in Vietnam's position.

First, the 50m and 100m events carry the fiercest competitive density, because fewer variables can create separation, so capability gaps surface more sharply. A nation wanting a presence here must invest in detail — reaction, start mechanics, turn mechanics. Investing in detail requires a detailed data system.

Second, distance freestyle has more inertia: a well-developed 800m and 1500m swimmer can hold position for years, because performance depends on accumulated aerobic base rather than explosive phases. This is the group where slow but stable development systems have a chance.

And this connects to a broader issue: the talent supply chain. Strong swimming nations do not only train athletes. They train coaches, sports physiologists, video analysts and support staff. When a small nation's development pipeline funds athlete retention but not coach development, it is building a system with a hole in the middle layer — the layer that determines how fast an athlete upgrades between ages 16 and 20.

Anti-Doping: The Section Every Report Skips

Among the forty pages I opened that night was a full chapter on rules and anti-doping. Every cell in it read "insufficient information." Technically correct, but it exposed something else: analytical systems routinely skip compliance checks, because compliance checks do not produce attractive numbers.

Four groups need review in any swimming profile.

The first is whereabouts obligations. Athletes in the World Anti-Doping Agency testing pool must file quarterly location information, and three filing failures within twelve months can trigger a sanction even without a positive test. For emerging young athletes, this is the largest administrative risk group, and it has nothing to do with whether they took a banned substance.

The second is therapeutic use exemptions. Some ordinary medications appear on the prohibited list. Exemptions follow a process, with deadlines and documentation. A profile missing this section is an unchecked profile.

The third is equipment rules. There is a historic marker every swimming analyst must remember: the late 2000s saw a wave of records broken en masse through polyurethane swimsuits, and from 2026 the world swimming governing body tightened rules on suit material, buoyancy and thickness. Any record comparison spanning 2026 without adjusting for suit technology is a flawed comparison.

The fourth is eligibility, including sporting nationality. This is a delicate area that surfaces during transfer windows: a young athlete developed in one country competing for another, with a defined waiting period. For small swimming nations, this is silent talent loss — no statement, no public dispute, just a name vanishing from one roster and appearing on another a few years later.

The Counter-Intuitive Angle: A Blank Report Is a Confession

Now the part I consider most important.

When I receive a structurally complete but hollow report, my first instinct as a professional is to fill it. I nearly did. I opened the archives, ready to reconstruct splits, rebuild the dataset.

Then I stopped.

Because there is a difference between "there is no data" and "nobody bothered to collect data." That difference is not in the analytical output. It is in the systemic diagnosis.

If data does not exist because the race has not happened yet, that is a problem of time. If data does not exist because the race happened and nobody recorded it, that is a problem of culture. The second is far more serious, and it cannot be solved by hiring one more person with a stopwatch.

My ISTJ instinct wants to reduce everything to process. But I have to remind myself: good process does not automatically produce good outcomes. Swimming is a sport full of non-linear variables — competition psychology, water quality, session timing, number of swims in a day, and things that cannot be measured at all, like family pressure or school workload. A perfect dataset can still misdescribe a seventeen-year-old mid-growth-spurt.

Correlation is not causation. I have to say this to myself every time my spreadsheet starts sounding too convincing.

For example: if I noticed that breakthrough domestic swimmers tend to train in 25m pools, I could conclude that 25m pools produce great athletes. That conclusion is wrong. The likelier truth is that 25m pools sit in major cities, where there are more training centres, more meets and more racing opportunities. The 25m pool is not the cause. It is a trace of an ecosystem.

That is why I refuse to write "Vietnamese swimming is playing well" or "Vietnamese swimming is falling behind" without specific data. Both statements are feelings packaged as judgments.

PPDA is not a number, it is a confession. A blank spreadsheet is the same: it confesses that we are used to answering only "who won," and have never asked "why did that person win, and in that particular way."

Profile Verification

Applying all this to Vietnam, four verification points emerge when assessing any swimmer's profile.

First, pool length. As established, a short-course mark cannot be compared directly against a long-course Olympic standard. A profile that does not state pool length is not yet eligible for international comparison.

Second, age-relative positioning. In sprint events, peaks tend to arrive earlier than in distance events. A nineteen-year-old yet to break through in the 100m freestyle may be near their ceiling, while a nineteen-year-old in the 1500m freestyle may still have substantial room. Judging both by the same yardstick is methodologically wrong.

Third, race-to-race stability. This is a metric we barely have, because domestic meets are too few and racing density too thin to generate a large enough sample. An athlete racing three times a year will naturally show a wider performance band than one racing ten times. That gap reflects opportunity, not ability.

Fourth, the origin of expectations. There is a type of expectation I call allocated expectation — it does not come from data but from the media gravity of a particular figure. In swimming, that pressure usually lands on whoever succeeds a golden generation. Comparing a new talent against a predecessor's times at the same age looks reasonable but fails to control variables: different event, different pool, different racing density, different nutrition and conditioning conditions.

Emotion is the most expensive commodity on the transfer market. In youth development it costs even more: a misplaced expectation can distort a swimmer's entire training path for two years.

Signals to Track in the Next Cycle

The lanes have stopped moving, but the split times still whisper inside my spreadsheet. What they whisper next will show up in four places.

I will watch whether any domestic meet begins publishing reaction times and 50m splits. This is the cheapest and clearest signal that measurement culture is shifting.

I will watch the racing density of the 15-to-19 age group. If official appearances per year rise, the performance variance band will narrow and predictive quality will improve.

I will watch whether athlete profiles state pool length for every result. A small detail — but small details are where systems reveal themselves.

And I will watch whether anyone has the nerve to publish a report whose bulk reads "insufficient information" — not out of self-blame, but to map the blank regions.

In swimming, nobody wins a meet by being good at the stopwatch. But a swimming nation that only knows how to press it at the finish wall will not travel far either. That blank spreadsheet was not a full stop. It was a to-do list, written in the quietest language available: the language of cells still waiting to be filled.