Vietnamese Martial Arts in 2026: 47 Training Sessions and a Blank Medal Board

On January 12, 2026, at the Trinh Hoai Duc sports hall in Hanoi, a coach opened a ruled attendance notebook and wrote in the right-hand column: 14 fighters. After the roll call he counted the signatures from the morning session. Eleven. The remaining three lines stayed blank, and they stayed blank for the next four months.

That notebook reached me through an archivist in Hanoi who made a habit of keeping coaches' notebooks when they retired. The paper edges have yellowed, but the number columns are still legible. For three years I did nothing but take notes. The real story of Vietnamese martial arts in 2026 begins on page 400 of a file nobody bothers to open.

A year with no regional arena

There was no Southeast Asian Games in 2026. The 11th edition had been held in Manila in 2026, and the 12th did not take place until Singapore in 2026. Vietnamese sport's international calendar that year collapsed into a single date: the 9th Asian Games in New Delhi, from November 19 to December 4, 2026.

Between the two Games, the sports budget worked in a very concrete way. Money and goods in kind were allocated first to the disciplines inside the medal programme: wrestling, judo, boxing, shooting, athletics, swimming. Traditional martial arts were not in that group. That did not mean they were banned. In the file I read, no document closes a single ethnic martial arts class. What was missing was a budget line.

The consequences showed in how things were organised. Traditional martial arts classes were pushed down to district level, taught in cultural houses, village courtyards and local sports halls. Fighters in those classes had no high-performance athlete food ration. They sorted out their own breakfast and trained in the afternoon after shifts at the cooperative or the factory.

The notebook in Trinh Hoai Duc belonged to a different group: the Hanoi wrestling, judo and boxing squad. In the first four months of 2026 the squad trained 47 sessions, three a week, skipping the days of drizzle because the hall floor was slippery. Each session ran 110 minutes, the first 40 of which were only warm-up and movement drills.

Three blank lines and 47 sessions

What is worth recording sits in the middle column of the notebook, where the coach logged the content of each session. Across 47 sessions he wrote the phrase "move on hand signal" 41 times. He adjusted the standing position of the attacking tempo-setter 47 times, an average of once per session. He did not allow full-contact sparring before the third month.

Based on my experience following matches across many different arenas, that kind of repetition is not a poverty of drills. It is how a coach with no medical room and no video analysis machine controls error. When strength cannot be measured with equipment, it gets measured in repetitions of the correct movement.

Three names signed in for all 47 sessions: Nguyen Van Hoa at 57kg, Tran Minh Son at 68kg and Pham Duc Long at 74kg. The fourth, Do Van Thanh at 62kg, missed four sessions with an ankle injury.

The cross-check sits on the last two pages. Across seven friendly bouts between February and April 2026, the Hanoi fighters lost an average of 3.2 points per bout for stance faults. Every one of those deducted points fell inside the first 20 seconds of the round, before the fighter had settled into rhythm. The coach noted in pencil in the margin: "one beat slow".

Another line on the page edge, the ink already smudged: each 57kg fighter was allocated 2,800 kcal a day. For someone training three sessions a week at moderate intensity, that is enough to live on. For someone entering a run of seven bouts in three months, it is thin. The notebook says nothing more about it, and its silence is also data.

Numbers do not lie. People choose numbers to lie to themselves. The results board hanging in the corner of the hall in 2026 was blank in the international medals column. Outsiders read that board and saw a martial arts culture in decline. But the board only recorded what belonged to the international competition programme; it had no column for training sessions, for signatures, or for how many came back after four months.

The three blank lines in the attendance book have a very ordinary reason. One man was transferred to a factory in Nam Dinh by order. One asked for leave to help his family with the winter rice crop. The third gave no explanation, and the coach recorded none. For four months he left those three lines untouched, no strike-through, no replacement name. Whoever sits next to the changing-room door is measuring their own power; the chair left empty in the corner of the training floor measures something else.

Nobody closed a door, someone just stopped counting

The popular account of this period splits into two camps. One says Vietnamese traditional martial arts were suppressed and had to be taught in secret after 2026. The other says the 1980s were a golden age of the grassroots martial arts movement. Both accounts skip the simplest mechanism: resource allocation.

The records I read show no sign of a blanket ban on ethnic martial arts. What existed was a measurement system that recognised results only at international events inside the medal programme. A discipline with no international competition has no quota; no quota means no food ration; no food ration means no full-time fighter.

Outsiders looked at the silence and called it decline. The quietest grandstand is the moment the crowd knows something before the fighters do: they know there is nothing to watch that year. From another angle, the absence of an arena kept a generation of traditional masters from burning their whole working lives in amateur events nobody attended. When the movement reopened in the early 1990s, many of them still had the strength to stand in front of a class.

In Thailand, where I work, 2026 was the year the big Bangkok stadiums ran on gambling money and gate tickets. In the same year, two different measurement systems told two different stories about the same kind of discipline. The language of suppression cannot explain that gap.

That language does not make a hard period any lighter either. The session count, the signatures and the three blank lines are still there.

The signal to keep tracking

What I keep tracking is the names of the three men who left the squad in 2026. If one of them reappears in the coaching lists of the 1990s, when the traditional martial arts federations were re-established, the 2026 story closes a different way: a four-month gap, not a full stop. I am leaving those three lines blank in my own record until I can trace them.