The Sound of Rackets in Guangzhou and Thirteen Years of Vietnamese Badminton Searching for a Successor

In August 2026, at the Tianhe Gymnasium in Guangzhou, there was a sound I have kept intact in my head for more than a decade: the sound of a string bed tightening at the end of a long rally. Not the crisp crack of a smash, but the dry snap of a racket face catching the shuttlecock on the edge, slightly off-centre, just enough to drop it close to the sideline. The arena went quiet for one beat. Then the applause rose unevenly, because half of that hall did not want to cheer for the player who had just lost the point.

The player who had just lost the point was Vietnamese. The player standing on the other side of the net was Lin Dan.

I was sitting in the press row, about fifteen metres from the court, close enough to hear rubber soles gripping the floor and the breathing between rallies. In my earpiece, a colleague from the broadcaster asked me in Mandarin how old this Vietnamese player was. I answered: thirty. He has been at this level for five years.

That is how my notes on Nguyen Tien Minh begin — not with a results table, but with a shuttlecock falling near the line and an arena falling silent.

Context: one country, one player, one decade

Before talking about thirteen years later, it is worth being precise about thirteen years earlier.

The 2026 Badminton World Championships were held in Guangzhou from 5 to 11 August. It was the edition where Lin Dan won the men's singles title by beating Lee Chong Wei in the final. In the other half of the draw, a player born on 12 February 2026 in Ho Chi Minh City reached the semi-finals and took bronze. It was Vietnam's first medal at a World Championships.

I stress the word "first" because it carries its own weight. Nguyen Tien Minh's record contains many things: Olympic appearances from Beijing 2026 and London 2026, titles in the Grand Prix system, a long stretch inside the world's top group across several cycles. But the bronze in Guangzhou is the only thing hanging at the very top of this sport.

That 2026 season also carried another marker I remember because I was there, working as a field host for an international sports news programme: the Sudirman Cup in Kuala Lumpur in May, badminton's biggest mixed team event. Standing in an airport between two tournaments, I realised something that has stayed with me throughout my career. At team level, China, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Denmark can each field three or four options for every position. Vietnam had one. And that one was thirty years old.

The single anchor

To understand why this story is still live, you have to understand the structure of Vietnamese badminton.

Vietnamese badminton develops along a narrow pyramid: a handful of large centres in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang, plus a few provinces with strong grassroots movements; below them a national youth tournament system; above them a small number of entries into the Badminton World Federation's professional tour. Between those two layers there is a gap that is very hard to bridge. The number of international events a young Vietnamese player can enter in a year is typically far lower than for a Malaysian or Thai player of the same age. Which means the number of high-level competitive minutes they accumulate is lower too.

In badminton, high-level competitive minutes are an asset that training money cannot buy. You can train twelve hours a day, but the feeling of standing across the net from someone who has reached a Super 1000 quarter-final only arrives when you are actually standing there. And every time you stand there, you take a slot that another player also wants.

The consequence? A country can produce one outstanding individual, but it struggles to produce a generation. Nguyen Tien Minh is the case where every factor converged at the right moment: physical gifts, discipline, a family that understood sport, and an era in which Asian badminton still had room for a player from outside the major powers. But a case like that, in probability terms, is an exception produced by a system, not a product rolling off the system's assembly line.

Modern men's singles has changed the rules of the game

This is the section where I want to spend the most words, because it is where the "search for a successor" narrative usually gets told wrong.

World men's singles in the 2010s and world men's singles today are two different sports in physical terms, even though the playing rules have barely changed.

In the early 2010s, a men's singles rally was on average shorter than it is now. The game relied more on early finishes: short serves, pushes to the two rear corners, waiting for a loose shuttle and smashing. A player could "rest" inside a rally with high, deep lifts. The heart rate had time to come down.

That has changed. Elite players serve short more often, but after the serve, the third and fourth shots are often already driven down the flanks. Rallies of fifteen strokes have become normal. A player has to hold an attacking stance while the feet are still moving backwards. The number of footwork steps in a game has risen, and more importantly, the number of footwork steps at high speed has risen.

I once counted with my eyes during a men's singles semi-final at a Super 1000 event: there were rallies in which both players had to cover the court diagonally four times before the shuttle touched the floor. Four times. In under twenty seconds.

That creates a physical problem many smaller badminton nations cannot solve. You need a strength and conditioning system specific to badminton, not a generic one. You need a hall with the right flooring so knees can absorb that volume of movement. You need a video analyst to tell you at which stroke of the rally your player is losing. You need a sports physician and an individualised recovery plan.

Each of those costs money. And when the budget is limited, the question is not "how do we train better", but "who do we train".

The economics of the ranking list

There is an aspect rarely discussed that determines the fate of small badminton nations: how the ranking points system actually works.

The World Federation's professional tour is tiered: Super 1000, Super 750, Super 500, Super 300, Super 100, then International Challenge and International Series below that. Points and prize money fall with each tier. Travel costs, however, barely fall at all.

A flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Europe, a week in a hotel, meals, court rental before the tournament — that is a fixed outlay. For a top-ten player, it is covered by prize money and sponsorship contracts. For a player ranked eightieth or ninetieth in the world, it is usually covered by the federation or the family.

Which means there is a threshold below which international competition becomes loss-making. And when you are below that threshold, you have to choose: travel less and stay below it, or travel more and spend a family's savings on a quarter-final appearance at a Super 300.

I have seen a young Vietnamese player standing in a hotel lobby after losing in the first round, calling home, and saying in a very even voice that everything was fine. Then he sat down, opened his laptop, and started watching a recording of his own match. No coach beside him. No analyst. Just him.

That scene, to me, matters more than any results table.

The next generation and the silence

Nguyen Thuy Linh has been Vietnam's leading women's singles player for years, and she has appeared repeatedly at major events, including Tokyo 2026 and Paris 2026. Le Duc Phat is the standout men's player of the next generation, and he was also in Paris 2026. Those are real steps forward and should not be dismissed.

But set against population size, the number of recreational badminton players, and the boom in courts across every urban district in the past decade, the number of Vietnamese players regularly appearing in the main draw of Super 500 events and above remains very small.

At Paris 2026, men's singles ended with Viktor Axelsen taking gold, Kunlavut Vitidsarn silver and Lee Zii Jia bronze. Those three names show the problem: Denmark, Thailand, Malaysia. Three countries with populations smaller than or comparable to Vietnam, each with a badminton system that can put a player on an Olympic podium.

So where is the gap? I would argue it is not in physical gifts. It is in what I call "internal competitive density".

A Thai player grows up with ten rivals of the same age group strong enough to compete every week. A Vietnamese player of the same age group often has two or three. You cannot overcome a strong opponent if you have to fly to another country to meet one. Competitive density is a kind of invisible infrastructure, and it cannot be built by pouring money into a handful of individuals.

Kunlavut Vitidsarn is a product of an academy founded by a former world champion, where children are trained on a multi-year programme and sent to international competition very early. Look at that and you see a pipeline, not an individual.

The contrarian angle: the obsession with a "successor" is a blind spot

This is where I want to say plainly what many people in the sport do not want to hear.

The story of "Vietnam searching for Nguyen Tien Minh's successor" has been told for thirteen years. It is compelling because it is a linear story with a protagonist, a climax, and an ending waiting to happen. But that frame creates a blind spot.

The first blind spot: it turns every young player into a "next version" and judges the later one against the earlier one's frame of reference. A player ranked fortieth in the world at twenty-two is judged a failure simply because at that age Nguyen Tien Minh was ranked higher. But career trajectories differ. Some players peak at twenty-seven. Linear comparison kills non-linear trajectories.

The second blind spot: it pushes resources towards a few names deemed "promising" instead of widening the base. Investing in a single peak of the pyramid looks faster than investing in a system. But the history of Asian badminton shows that the countries that endure choose the second path.

The third blind spot, and the one I care about most: it forces people inside the game to constantly explain, justify and defend themselves. Over thirteen years I have heard "I'm not there yet", "I'm injured", "I need more time" many times. Every one of those statements is true and every one gets doubted.

I once made a serious mistake in my own work. In July 2026, in Kazan, during the World Cup quarter-final between Brazil and Belgium, I wrote that the opening goal was a header, when in fact it came from an own goal in the thirteenth minute. Hundreds of critical comments poured in. I was so ashamed that I turned off my phone for a whole day and just watched the footage again.

Since then I have had one rule: minute, shirt number, player, the pass that led to the goal — all of it verified three times.

Kazan taught me that some mistakes do not need to be justified — they only need to be lived with.

And when I applied that rule to how I look at young Vietnamese players, I understood something: they do not need our pity, and they do not need our forgiveness. They need us to stop using one person as the yardstick for everyone else.

Injury and the information blind spot

There is another structural issue I have tracked for years: how injury information is handled in badminton specifically and in Vietnamese sport generally.

In many professional sporting environments, an athlete's injury status is published to a standard: type of injury, expected recovery time, rehabilitation phase. That transparency helps fans understand correctly, helps media report accurately, and, more importantly, spares the athlete from having to explain constantly.

In Vietnam, injury information usually works the other way: kept quiet until disclosure is unavoidable, and when disclosed, kept minimal. I understand the reasoning. Nobody wants an opponent to know where it hurts. But the price of that discretion is a blind spot, and inside that blind spot, rumour spreads faster than fact.

A player absent for two months for unspecified reasons will attract two hypotheses: either he has lost form, or he has lost motivation. The hypothesis "he is recovering from an ankle injury and does not want to say" rarely makes the table.

I was once in the waiting room of a sports hospital and ran into a Vietnamese player there, ankle wrapped, sitting alone. He recognised me and smiled. We said nothing about the injury. He only asked whether next week's overseas tournament would be broadcast.

That is everything I know about that player's injury.

Three years without applause

I want to tell a story of my own, because it bears directly on how I see this subject.

In 2026, when the pandemic stopped every tournament, I was in quarantine in Guangzhou and fell into a period of mental exhaustion. For weeks I could not write anything worthwhile. My event hosting work vanished. No audience, no stage, no applause.

When football returned in June 2026, I was assigned to write about a match played at an empty Goodison Park. I decided not to write about tactics. I wrote about the sound of the ball striking the ground beating out a rhythm, and about how the manager had to shout his instructions because there was no crowd noise to cover his voice. The piece was called "A Day Without Noise" and it was widely shared, perhaps because it matched how millions of people were feeling at home.

Three years of stagnation, and I did not find applause. But I found my own ears.

I mention this not to talk about myself, but because I think of Vietnamese players in their twenties and mid-twenties, right in the stretch where the stands do not call their names. No medal, no headline, no sponsorship contract. Only the training hall, flight schedules, and a ranking that shifts a few places each month.

I do not want to be the person who talks the most in the room. I want to be the person who remembers most clearly.

And I remember the names the news feed forgets.

A silence that is not a void

There is a misreading of the past thirteen years: treating them as thirteen years of failure.

I do not see it that way. In those thirteen years, Vietnamese badminton gained more training centres, more youth tournaments held on a regular schedule, and more families treating badminton as a serious path rather than an after-school hobby. The number of courts in major cities has risen sharply, creating a larger recreational base — and from that base, some will climb to the professional level.

At the same time, it must be said plainly: a badminton nation with only one player inside the world's top group for fifteen years has a pipeline problem, not a luck problem.

That problem will not be solved by finding a "successor". It will be solved by making it financially and professionally viable to be the second, third or fourth player.

What has to change

From my experience watching matches and development systems in many countries, I see three things that need to change, and none of them involves finding an exceptional individual.

The first is domestic competitive density. More national tournaments, held more regularly, with an internal ranking system, so that young players face strong opponents at home rather than waiting for an international flight.

The second is data infrastructure. A modern national team needs someone to film, someone to cut footage, someone to read it. Without data on which stroke of the rally your player is losing, every tactical adjustment is guesswork.

The third is transparency in injury communication, at a moderate level and with the athlete's agreement. Not everything needs to be public. But there needs to be a mechanism so that the blind spot is not filled with rumour.

These three things sound technical and dry. But I believe they matter more than finding an eighteen-year-old with a heavy smash.

A shuttlecock falling near the line

Back to Guangzhou, August 2026.

After the semi-final, I walked from the press area down into the corridor beneath the stands. There was a row of plastic chairs, and a few volunteers were packing up the scoreboards. A Vietnamese player walked past me, racket bag on his shoulder, sweat still wet on his shirt. He said nothing and did not need to.

Thirteen years later, I still think about that moment more than about the medal. Because the medal was the result of one afternoon, while that moment was the result of twenty years.

Gold will fade. Character stays.

But character does not generate itself. It is built in training halls, on economy-class flights, in first-round defeats nobody films, and by the people who stay behind after the lights go out in the arena.

An unfinished thought

I do not believe Vietnam will never produce another world-class badminton player. I believe it will not arrive in the way we are waiting for.

It will not arrive as a repeat of a bronze medal in Guangzhou. It will arrive more quietly: a nineteen-year-old winning a first round at a Super 300 in a city nobody in Vietnam has heard of, then three years later a Super 750 quarter-final, then one afternoon standing in the semi-final of a major event. And at the final moment of the decisive rally, an arena will again fall silent for one beat before the applause rises.

The best narrator is not the one who knows everything, but the one who makes us believe the story is not over.

I am writing this so that story does not get closed too early.