Binh Dinh, Vovinam and the Sleeping Giant: Vietnamese Martial Arts at Its Narrowest Door in Two Decades

In 2026, at the Rizal Memorial arena in Manila, I sat in the seventh row and counted. Three hours, eleven delegations, four occasions on which the judging panel had to pull out scorecards and correct them. Nobody in the stands booed. Nobody stood up. There was only the loudspeaker reading scores in two languages and a few polite rounds of applause.

That was the moment I understood why eighteen years of writing about martial arts still had not earned me the right to call myself someone who understands them. In forms events, applause does not measure the quality of a strike. A martial tradition can hold the strongest forms in Southeast Asia and still sit outside the medal table, simply because no one on the judging panel understands what they are looking at.

I thought of Binh Dinh. The land that produced the Tay Son dynasty, where Nguyen Hue recruited soldiers by choosing officers through martial skill, and where even today, every morning, old masters teach children forms that no book records in full. A martial tradition does not die when it runs short of fighters. It dies when it runs short of people who can retell it in a language the scoring world understands.

To place this story, three markers are needed. In 2026, Nguyen Loc founded Vovinam in Hanoi, systematising a Vietnamese martial lineage into a school with a curriculum, belts and competition rules. In 2026, Vovinam first appeared at the SEA Games in Palembang, Indonesia. In 2026, when Vietnam hosted the 31st SEA Games, Vovinam returned as a host-nation sport and contributed a substantial share of Vietnam's gold medals.

Set beside that is Taekwondo. The Korean martial art was systematised from the 1950s, joined its World Federation in 2026, became a demonstration sport at the Seoul 2026 Olympics and an official medal sport from Sydney 2026. Also at Sydney 2026, Tran Hieu Ngan won Vietnam a Taekwondo silver medal. A foreign martial art became Vietnam's earliest Olympic medal channel, long before any domestic lineage had a comparable opportunity.

The distance between those two trajectories lies not in the quality of technique. It lies in the system.

If Vovinam and Vietnam's traditional martial lineages want to leave the safe zone of the SEA Games, they must answer the question that Wushu, Karate and Pencak Silat have each already answered: when the referee raises the card, what exactly is being measured?

Wushu is the clearest example. The sport scores forms across three panels: A for movement quality, B for overall performance, C for difficulty. Since 2026, the International Wushu Federation has tightened difficulty scoring, requiring athletes to pre-register their acrobatic and balance combinations and capping the number of repetitions. It sounds like a technical tweak, but it is a statement: this martial art has chosen controlled sportification over free interpretation.

Karate took another route. Kata at the Tokyo 2026 Olympics was scored on technical and athletic criteria, with seven judges and a mechanism that discards both the highest and lowest scores. Yet Karate was dropped from Paris 2026, exactly one cycle after its debut. A martial art with tens of millions of practitioners can still be removed from the biggest stage by a single administrative decision.

Martial arts do not lose on the mat. They lose in the meeting room.

That is where Vovinam stands.

At the SEA Games, Vovinam is scored across two main groups: combat and forms. Combat produces a binary result, win or lose, so it draws little dispute. Forms are different. Scores depend on the judges' scale, and that scale shifts with each Games, each host nation, each rulebook issued later than the competition date. Having followed several SEA Games featuring Vovinam, what irritates me most is not the score itself, but that athletes often learn the result before they understand the criteria.

I have sat long enough in technical meetings to notice a pattern. A martial art that wants fair judging must first have a criteria set stable across at least three Games cycles. Vovinam has not achieved that stability. Every time the host changes, the number of events, the number of medal sets and the bracket structure shift again. An athlete trains three years for one form, only to arrive and discover that form has been moved to another category.

Do not read the numbers. Read the story the numbers dare not tell.

Vietnam's medal table at SEA Games featuring Vovinam always looks good. Behind those figures, however, sits a structural problem: most medals come from host-nation events or from events with only a handful of delegations. A gold in a four-delegation event is worth something very different from a gold in a twelve-delegation event. The overall standings do not distinguish between the two.

This is where I must state my position plainly. I do not trust indicators packaged as measures of effort. In performance martial arts, the number of spins, the height of a jump, the duration of a balance can all be optimised to beautify a scorecard without strengthening a single genuine strike. A spectacular kick inside a form says nothing about the ability to finish an opponent. A high-scoring form does not prove the practitioner can fight.

Conversely, an ugly but effective technique is usually undervalued. This is the paradox every performance martial art faces: the scoring system rewards what can be seen and penalises what can only be felt.

Taekwondo resolved that paradox by splitting the two branches entirely. Combat uses electronic body armour, force sensors and a clear rulebook on scoring zones. Forms, or poomsae, took a separate road, entering the world championship system in 2026 and reaching the 2026 Asian Games as an official event. Vietnam's Chau Tuyet Van is one of the most decorated athletes in the poomsae branch, and her pathway exists because of that system, not because of luck.

Tactics are only a coat. The person wearing it is what I examine closely.

Look to Indonesia's Pencak Silat for the reverse side. The sport first entered the 2026 Asian Games as a host-nation event, harvesting a large medal haul for Indonesia, then returned in later editions with a shrinking number of events. A national martial art can use a Games to promote itself, but if its scoring and coaching systems are not internationalised, it will remain forever dependent on the host nation's vote.

That is the lesson Vovinam and Vietnamese traditional martial arts need to read carefully. The leverage of a martial art at the international negotiating table is proportional to the number of countries with member federations, not to the number of SEA Games medals. Taekwondo had more than 200 member countries before entering the Olympics. Wushu has more than 150. Vovinam, to date, remains concentrated mainly in Southeast Asia and a few Vietnamese communities in Europe and the Americas.

So what lies ahead?

Vietnamese traditional martial arts hold an advantage Taekwondo once held: they are not bound to a single school. There are hundreds of lineages across the provinces, from Binh Dinh and Quang Nam to Hanoi and Nam Dinh, each with its own curriculum. The national Traditional Martial Arts Festival, held periodically since 2026, is an effort to channel those streams into one current. But gathering also means choosing: what to keep, what to drop, what to standardise.

This is where I want to push back on my own colleagues in the trade.

Many argue that traditional martial arts should remain a heritage pursuit and not chase medals. It sounds noble. But heritage cannot feed the people who teach it. A school in Binh Dinh that wants to keep its classes running needs fee-paying students, needs parents to believe their children are learning something with social value. When a martial art is absent from television, has no competitions and no sponsored athletes, the flow of students dries up. Heritage dies quietly, not through a single decision, but through ten years in which nobody noticed.

Yet I also do not believe in sportification at any cost. If Vovinam chases SEA Games medals while neglecting a scoring system independent of the host, it will repeat Pencak Silat's path: plenty of medals, little international credibility, and eventually a shrinking event list.

This is where I could be wrong.

There is another possibility I lack the data to rule out: that regionalisation is the correct road. That Vovinam does not need a global Olympic model, but should become the standard martial art of Southeast Asia, much as Muay Thai built an empire around Thai stadiums and international venues without needing Olympic medals. If so, the measure of success is not the number of member countries, but the commercial value of regional tournaments.

I leave that possibility open. But even along a regional route, one thing holds: the scoring criteria must be stable and public before the season, not one week before competition day.

Back to Binh Dinh.

On one visit there, I sat in a small roadside training hall, watching a group of teenagers drill a form before their academic classes. They did not look polished. Some had misaligned stances, some forgot their directions. But when the master tapped the rhythm, the whole group changed movements at the same instant, and for that moment the room fell silent. I realised: what was being passed on here was not medals. It was living memory.

And living memory can become a system, if someone sits down and writes it out.

From the bottom of the rankings, I can see an empire waiting to wake.

The question is how it will wake. If it follows the Taekwondo path, three things are required: an international organisation with enough member countries, a scoring rulebook stable across multiple cycles, and a generation of athletes trained to compete on stages larger than the SEA Games. If it follows the Muay path, it needs a commercial platform strong enough for training halls to make a living from teaching.

Both roads are long. But standing still is the only road guaranteed to fail.

Based on my experience following martial arts competitions and Games across Asia, what I have learned does not lie in technique. It lies in this: every enduring martial tradition has a group of people responsible for turning memory into documents. Korea had that group for Taekwondo from the 1960s. Japan had it for Judo and Karate from the early 20th century. Vietnam has memory, has people, has arenas. What it lacks is structure.

The sleeping giant does not lack strength. It lacks an alarm clock.

I will state my prediction plainly, along with the condition that would make it wrong.

Within the next three SEA Games cycles, if the Vietnam Traditional Martial Arts Federation and the Vovinam community can publish a fixed scoring rulebook for forms, applied across at least two consecutive Games, and register at least ten additional countries with official member federations, Vovinam will appear on a continental stage beyond the SEA Games. If, by the end of that cycle, the number of member countries remains where it is, then every SEA Games medal will be nothing more than a fond memory in a cabinet.

The condition that would make me wrong is clear: an administrative decision by a continental federation, much like Karate being dropped from Paris 2026, could erase every calculation. I know that. And I still place the bet, because this time there is something different from all the times before: a generation of young athletes training with data, video and the internet, not only with oral memory.

If you run a training hall in Binh Dinh, Quang Nam or Hanoi, your question is not how to produce the next SEA Games champion. The larger question is this: are you rewriting your form in a language a judge on another continent can understand, or are you still teaching it in a language only your own students understand?

The answer to that question will decide whether this giant wakes, or sleeps for another generation.