When a Sports Analysis Has No Data: A Story from Vietnam’s Swimming Pool

The document was thin, yet heavier than a wall of water. On Tuesday morning, I received four pages of sports analysis without a single number. Nine sections were neatly arranged: technique, performance, competition system, world landscape, anti-doping, career path, risk, narrative, and industry impact. In each section, the writer had entered only three words: “insufficient data.” There was no swimmer’s name, no split time, no performance marker, no source reference. The paper looked like a control room full of equipment, but every screen was dark. I sat with that analysis for a long time, asking myself whether emptiness could be a message. In more than a decade as a sports journalist, I had rarely seen anyone work so hard to say that they did not know. Yet that willingness to admit ignorance reveals something bigger: Vietnamese swimming still lacks a proper data language to tell its own story. I remember standing by the pool at a Đà Nẵng sports complex on quiet afternoons. The pool was empty except for the sound of water lapping against the walls like breathing. A youth-team coach often stood there, holding an old stopwatch in one hand and a yellowed notebook in the other. They recorded athletes’ results the same way their predecessors had: each number trapped on a thin page, never compared, never extracted, never visualised. In the generation of Nguyễn Huy Hoàng and Trần Hưng Nguyên, Vietnam has swimmers who know how to endure and how to explode. But the question professionals need to ask is not how fast they swam, but how correctly they swam. Today, world football has entered the data era. In swimming, experts talk about turn speed, underwater time, glide distance and pace distribution. Every start has a reaction time. Every turn has a metric. Every kick can be measured by a sensor. The world no longer argues with emotion. It argues with charts. Yet in the analysis I received, nine vital dimensions of elite sport each answered with the same words: insufficient data. It did not say the athlete was weak, or that the athlete was strong. It made no technical conclusion because there was no measurement. It did not locate performance because there was no comparison table. It did not assess injury risk because there was no long-term health record. The entire analysis became an honest confession of the system’s limits. Based on my years of watching local swimming meets, I rarely see split tables published after each race. We know who touched the wall first, but we do not know whether they swam faster in the last five hundred metres or faded in the middle three hundred. We do not know who started well but turned poorly, or who swam efficiently in the middle yet had no finishing kick. Without those layers of data, coaching becomes like holding a flashlight in darkness. The story of lower-ranked swimmers is even more painful. In provinces without specialised training centres, a child may be discovered simply because they swim faster than their friends. Without proper biological tests, nobody measures height, arm span, shoulder flexibility or ability to handle training loads. No one films their early block starts to compare with their adult technique. Talent appears by luck, is sustained by willpower, and then easily disappears when the teenage growth spurt arrives without anyone understanding why. A data-less analysis also raises questions about transparency. In Vietnamese sport, it is common to celebrate national records set in unequal conditions. A swimmer may set a record in a shallow pool that cannot be compared to a performance in a certified international venue. Without standardised data, comparisons between generations become meaningless. We may celebrate a record, but does that record truly reflect capability or merely an unverified system? I once mispronounced a player’s name during my first broadcast, but that day the ball pronounced the real name of the match. Today I read an analysis without a name, and that namelessness reveals a disease: we still count medals more than we measure journeys. Nobody denies the value of a SEA Games gold. Yet between one medal and the ability to repeat that result in Asia or the world lies a long gap in methodology. Look at the world’s leading swimming teams. They do not simply pick the fastest athletes; they build a system that allows mistakes and corrects them. Every training session has a numerical target. Every athlete has an electronic health record. They monitor heart rate, lactate and sleep quality. They do not predict the future by emotion. They predict by patterns. More importantly, they treat data as a story, not a prison. Data does not replace the emotion in the stands or the tears of a swimmer at the finish. But data gives that story a backbone. Without data, a writer can only say the athlete swam beautifully. With data, the writer can explain why, which stage was strongest and what remains unfulfilled. An empty data field is not only a scientist’s problem. It is also a writer’s thirst. By contrast, I believe missing data need not be the end. If we look correctly, emptiness can become creative space. Vietnam cannot copy the full training-centre model of wealthy nations because our resources are different. But we can start with something tiny: standardising how a single practice is recorded, agreeing on the criteria for starts, turns and finishes, and building an open database that provinces can feed. If each province has one properly trained sports analyst, the national swimming map will change. The future of Vietnamese swimming may not depend on buying expensive equipment from abroad. The future lies in creating a disciplined habit: a number must be written the moment it appears, must be re-read, compared and used for decisions. In strong sports nations, this has become instinct. In Vietnam, it is still a quiet revolution awaiting an initiator. People often say performance is the destination. But for me, a blank analysis table is sometimes more valuable than one filled with guessed numbers. Honesty is the beginning of science. When we admit that we do not know how our athletes are swimming, then we can begin the journey of learning. Nine empty sections are nine unopened doors. If someone is patient enough to knock on each door, they may find not treasure, but a series of questions — these days, however, the right questions. I am not afraid of an analysis without numbers. I fear fake numbers created to polish reports. In sport, as in life, lies are always more dangerous than emptiness. When the stadium is empty, the ball still rolls, and the disciplined ear still hears the flow of water. The analysis in my hands answered no questions, but it gave me a belief: the author of that analysis chose to stay with the truth. Vietnamese swimming does not lack talent. In local pools, there are still boys with long arms, natural builds and brave hearts. What is missing is a map. And a map can only be drawn with data. If today we begin to record every second, every breath, every turn, then ten years from now nobody will have to write “insufficient data” in a serious report. They will write: this swimmer came from somewhere, passed through these milestones, and needs these things to reach the world. I looked at the document one last time before folding it. Outside, the Đà Nẵng sun was still long. The pool where I train with young swimmers was still full, flat like an unexamined mirror. Perhaps tomorrow a coach will take out a notebook and record one practice with greater precision. Perhaps the number will be tiny. But to me, it is worth more than a medal if it is used correctly. Swim slowly to hear the water. Record little to understand more. That is how I want to continue my story.