After Anh Vien, Vietnamese Women's Swimming Searches for a New Voice Beside an Empty Pool

Two in the morning, and I was still sitting in front of the screen in Nha Trang, rewinding a forty-second clip. In that clip, a Vietnamese female swimmer had just touched the wall, lifted her head to check the scoreboard, and quietly swam back to the edge. No cheers. No cameras pointed at her. In one corner of the stands, a few relatives clapped, softly enough that the arena's ventilation fans swallowed the sound.

I have watched thousands of swims like that over more than twenty years in this trade. And I have learned one thing: the most valuable moments of Vietnamese women's swimming rarely happen on a medal podium. They happen at the pool's edge, where a sixteen-year-old who just lost still bows to her coach, where a thirty-year-old quietly removes her goggles after the final swim of her career. Behind the doors of the changing room, there are stories that have never been told.

A decade carried on one name

People usually talk about Vietnamese swimming through one name: Nguyen Thi Anh Vien. The girl from Can Tho, born in 2026, became the backbone of the nation's women's lanes, trained at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, and appeared at the Rio 2026 and Tokyo 2026 Olympics. For nearly a decade, whenever the Vietnamese swimming team entered a regional arena, expectation rested entirely on one pair of shoulders.

That was both a source of pride and a warning. When a sport stands on one individual, the whole system behind her slowly loses its reason to move on its own. I have seen this in many other women's sports: women's football once depended on a few stars, women's volleyball too. We build a tower and forget the foundation.

When Anh Vien announced her retirement not long after the SEA Games in Vietnam closed, the question the experts had dodged for years suddenly became impossible to dodge: Who is next? And more painfully: Is there anyone next?

Where the women's lanes actually stand

To answer that, I have to go back to what happens under the water, not on the results board. Swimming is a sport of details that are brutally small. A 200-meter individual medley is divided into four different strokes, and each has its own sequence: the starting posture, the underwater glide after leaving the block, breathing rhythm, turning technique, and the final touch.

Based on my experience following matches and regional meets, the gap between a Vietnamese female swimmer and the regional leaders is almost never about endurance. It lives in three things: the start, the underwater phase, and the turn. In short races, these three decide most of the time. A swimmer may cover the middle of the race faster than her rival, but if she loses half a second on the underwater glide and another half second on each turn, she finishes behind.

I once counted the turns of a young female swimmer in a 400-meter race. She turned slower than her opponent on all seven occasions. Added up, that was about three seconds — a huge margin at regional level. Yet when I reviewed her middle 200 meters, her average speed was equal. The problem was not fitness. The problem was where the technique was coached, by whom, and for how long.

The problem is infrastructure, not spirit

In many provinces, a standard 50-meter pool is still a luxury. Major training centers cluster in a few localities. That means a girl with talent in a remote area must leave her family very early if she wants to pursue the lanes. She trades her childhood for a training slot while her peers are still sitting in classrooms.

On a trip to learn about regional training centers, I noticed a paradox. The places that produce the best swimmers are often the places with the fewest. The fewer the athletes, the weaker the internal competition, and the harder it is for a talent to push past herself.

Vietnamese women's swimming has one traditional strength: the ability to endure. Our athletes are famous for their resilience in long and medley events. But endurance is no longer enough in a world where other nations have moved to data-driven training models, where every breath and every turn is measured and optimized.

The game of short and long pools

One technical detail few Vietnamese spectators notice: results in a short course (25 meters) and a long course (50 meters) cannot be compared directly. A short course involves more turns, so the advantage goes to whoever rotates well. A long course exposes endurance and pace distribution.

This matters because many domestic and regional meets are held in short course, while the Olympics and world championships are long course. A swimmer can shine in short course, break a national record, then struggle when she switches to long course. The media sometimes forgets this context and calls it a step backwards. The truth is that they are two different games, and converting results between them is an analytical trap.

This is why I always check pool length before judging any performance. A number standing alone, without context, is a meaningless number.

The SEA Games is no longer the only yardstick

For years, the SEA Games was the biggest stage Vietnamese women's swimming aimed at. That was historically true, but it is becoming a limitation. When the major-event cycle compresses, pressure for regional medals can push us toward the safe path: focusing on events easy to medal in instead of investing in events that compete at continental and world level.

At recent SEA Games, Vietnamese swimming still delivered notable results, but the broader picture shows a stall in the women's group. Regional nations such as Singapore and Thailand maintain squad depth, while we often have only one or two standout names per event.

Squad depth is what I always watch. A team with three athletes in the same event creates internal pressure, and internal pressure is the cheapest progress driver a sport can have.

Behind the glow of medals

This is where I have to say plainly something Vietnamese sport is often reluctant to admit. Vietnamese women's swimming operates on a medal economy: an athlete's value is measured almost entirely by medals at one major meet. When she wins, she is celebrated for a few days. When she loses, she vanishes from the press.

I once wrote about a young female swimmer at a national meet. She finished in a position nobody remembers, but one detail kept my eyes on her: after climbing out, she sat beside her coach, opened a small notebook, and wrote down her split times. She was analyzing herself. That is professional behavior the media never records.

That story points to a blind spot: we reward results but not process. A sport that only celebrates the winner teaches its youth that only winning is worth living for. And that is how we lose the second and third layers — the people who keep the women's lanes full.

A counterintuitive view: commercial value or competitive value

There is a popular notion that women's sport must first become "commercially attractive" before it gets investment. I think that is putting the cart before the horse. The commercial value of women's swimming does not come from trying to look glamorous. It comes from the depth and continuity of its story.

A discipline mentioned only four days every two years will never build a fan base. Audiences bond with people, not scoreboards. They want to know what that girl ate before her race, what she feared in her first swim, what she thought when she touched the wall without a medal.

I went to Russia looking for answers and found only more questions. It was a football World Cup, but the lesson was the same: fans are not drawn by results boards, they are drawn by stories.

Another popular notion deserves questioning: the management of training load and injury. We have romanticized the story of "resting to recover", but sometimes that is really about making room for commercial events and friendlies. In swimming, a competitor's shoulders and knees are her most precious assets. A shoulder injury not properly treated can end a nineteen-year-old girl's career. And I have never seen a female athlete allowed to say plainly that she was made to compete too much because of the schedule.

The stands are empty, but the voice from the changing room has never stopped

During the pandemic, when almost all sport froze, I launched a series of online interviews. I asked female athletes one very simple question: What is the biggest thing you have lost? The answers kept me silent for a long time. One said she lost the feeling of competing. One said she lost income. One said she lost even the belief that she would get another chance.

In women's sport, stories like these usually die in silence because nobody asks. When the stands are empty, we finally listen to the athletes.

Since then, I have changed how I work. In every piece about a women's discipline, I try to let the athlete occupy most of the stage. I ask open questions. I let them tell it themselves. I record their names accurately, three times, before publishing.

What is changing

Not everything is bleak. Vietnamese women's swimming shows small but real signals. More parents are teaching their daughters to swim from a young age, not only for safety but for competition. A few localities have paid more attention to building standard pools. Domestic meets are starting to receive better coverage, though still far from what is needed.

In Nha Trang that year, I did not just open a channel — I opened a door. That door showed me that women's sport fans are not few. They are simply not served properly. When I commentated on a women's football match with a few thousand views, I received dozens of thank-you comments. Those women told me they had waited a long time for this.

Where are the women? They are still there, beside the lanes, beside the pitch, waiting to be seen.

We need a system, not a star

If I could propose one thing for Vietnamese women's swimming, I would not ask for another Olympic slot. I would ask for three things. First, a domestic competition system thick enough that young athletes race at least eight to ten times a year. Second, a specialized technical program for the start, the underwater phase and the turn, because that is where we lose the most time. Third, a transparent mechanism for health and training-load management, so that an eighteen-year-old girl does not have to choose between her career and the health of her shoulders.

These three things are not glamorous. They will not generate big headlines. But they will generate a generation.

A star is the product of a system, not its cause. We were lucky to have an Anh Vien. If we keep waiting for the next stroke of luck, we will wait a long time beside an empty pool.

A last word, not yet closed

A week later, I reviewed that forty-second clip and saw that I had been wrong. I used to think it was a sad moment. But looking again, the girl in the clip did not look sad at all. She touched the wall, checked the board, nodded to herself, and quietly swam to the edge to prepare for the next swim.

That is what I want to tell. Not about a medal, but about a girl who still wants to swim after every spectator has gone home. Vietnamese women's swimming does not lack talent. It lacks someone who stays behind, opens a notebook, and writes it down. The voice from the changing room is still there. The only question is: who will listen?