Vietnamese Swimming After Ánh Viên: A Vacuum Named Successor

That night the pool was so quiet I could hear water dripping from someone’s hair as they climbed out. Seven in the evening, the overhead lights broke into gold flecks on the deep blue surface. I sat in the third row, notebook open, pen still capped. When the eight lanes rose behind the starting blocks together, no one in the stands dared to breathe. Then the whistle. Eight bodies knifed into the water like blades tearing a mirror, and in that instant I understood that what I was waiting for lay beyond the race itself. I was waiting for the silence that follows the first hand touching the wall — a silence only those who have stood beside a running track can truly understand. Some races are not measured by the clock, but by the silence between two breaths.

That final was one of the few times I sat close enough to hear everything. Not the cheering — the breathing. The breath of a medley swimmer surfacing on the third turn sounded like a squeezed bellows: short, urgent, and full of calculation. I have followed Vietnamese swimming since my university days, rereading old meet reports, and that night I saw again what I always look for: a race without Ánh Viên.

Nguyễn Thị Ánh Viên was once an entire sky over Vietnamese swimming. The girl from Cần Thơ brought the country a SEA Games medal collection that may stand untouched for a long time, along with a continental bronze in the individual medley — a milestone Vietnamese swimming waited a long while to match. For nearly a decade, whenever anyone mentioned Vietnamese swimming, they mentioned one name. That concentration was a source of pride, but also a kind of poverty. When an entire sport rests its hopes on one person, the day that person stops, a vacuum appears behind her.

That vacuum opened at the worst possible moment: as Ánh Viên passed her prime, as SEA Games kept calling her name, and as Vietnamese swimming was forced to answer a question it had never had to answer before — who comes next?

I returned from a regional games with a notebook full of numbers, and what troubled me was the gap between the splits. Reviewing the women’s split charts, I saw a familiar pattern of effort distribution: a good start, a steady acceleration, then a fade over the final 50 meters. In the next lanes, swimmers from Singapore and Thailand did the opposite — they held a machine-like rhythm and only truly lifted over the last two strokes. The cause is not fitness. It is energy management, something I learned from track and field itself: a good runner knows how much is left in the final lap rather than sprinting hardest off the line.

The key point is this: Vietnamese swimming’s gap with the region is decided by rhythm and the ability to read a race, more than by raw power.

I have spent hours poolside watching something that seems small: the angle of the turn. A swimmer who optimizes the turn can save a fraction of a second each time, and across eight turns in a 400-meter race, those fractions add up to enough to change a medal’s color. People here often say races are won by hundredths of a second, but those hundredths are the work of hundreds of technical sessions, not one evening of determination.

I remember talking with a veteran swimming coach. He said something I copied verbatim: “Swimming is the only sport where an athlete fights both the opponent and the liquid surrounding them.” Water offers no wall to grip, no ground to push against. Every ounce of propulsion must be traded against drag. If technique is off, part of every gram of effort is taken by the water. In swimming, efficiency is life.

When I compared Vietnam’s women’s 200-meter freestyle with the region’s stronger swimming nations, what struck me was not absolute speed but stroke count per length. A top swimmer holds a nearly unchanged stroke count throughout a race — tired as she is, the arm stays long, the legs stay even. With us, the stroke count tends to rise late, meaning the athlete is swimming on strength rather than technique. When technique unravels, the arm shortens, drag rises, and the race ends exactly by the rule.

Another detail I noticed: Vietnamese swimmers often swim very well in heats, then slump in finals. I once thought it was psychological, but after many viewings I believe the deeper cause lies in pacing. In heats, with no pressure to win, they swim relaxed and post strong times. In finals, when stronger opponents appear, they are pulled into someone else’s rhythm and start at a pace not meant for them. Swimming faster than capacity over the first 100 meters means paying for it over the last 100.

On the men’s side the picture differs. Vietnamese male swimmers tend to be stronger over short distances than long ones, reflecting a reality of physique and selection. Regional nations hold an edge in events demanding speed-endurance because they build an even cohort of athletes early. We have standout individuals but lack a tier of comparable swimmers to create internal pressure. That pressure matters more than we think: an athlete improves fastest when someone beside them in every session is good enough to pull them up.

I do not recount these things to criticize. I recount them because I once stood on the other side of the notebook, and I know how an athlete feels when they finish and the time is not what they hoped. I asked a young swimmer after a defeat: “What did you really feel out there?” She paused, then said: “I was afraid of the far bank.” Those three words say more than any results table. The fear was not in the opponent. The fear was in the stretch of water itself.

In silence, an athlete’s heart beats louder than any cheer. I believe Vietnamese swimming is at exactly such a hush: the roar of the Ánh Viên years has faded, and now is the time to hear its own heartbeat clearly.

What is worth saying is that I am not entirely pessimistic. Looking at the rising generation, I see signs that did not exist ten years ago: training centers built on more scientific systems, young coaches formally educated, and most importantly, a generation of parents sending children to the pool out of love for the water rather than for medals. I once said the empty stands of 2026 taught me something: sport never goes silent, it only changes its voice. Vietnamese swimming is the same. It has not lost its voice. It is learning a different one.

Looking to Singapore, I see a lesson worth pondering. A tiny nation, smaller in population than a large Vietnamese city, once produced an Olympic champion in the 100-meter butterfly. Their secret was not population but a closed selection-and-training pipeline from schools to the national team, plus a grassroots base wide enough not to miss talent. They did not wait for a miracle. They built a machine capable of producing one.

That is also what Vietnamese swimming must make clear. For that voice to carry, more than individual effort is needed. Swimming is a sport of systems: standard pools, long-term curricula, regular competitions, and a competitive path designed from childhood. In many regional nations, a ten-year-old already has a national calendar to measure against. Here, many talents face equals only a few times a year. That lack of competition means they grow up missing experience, and when they reach a big stage they must learn on the spot lessons that should have come long ago.

I wonder whether we are waiting for one extraordinary individual and then placing an entire sport on their shoulders. Swimming cannot live on one person’s miracle. It must live on the steady current of hundreds.

One rarely mentioned aspect: Vietnamese swimming needs a more sustainable media and sponsorship ecosystem. A sport thrives only when it has a regular audience, and an audience arrives only when stories are told regularly. Today, swimming is noticed mainly during major games. Between them, the pool is nearly absent from the press. That silence leaves athletes without motivation to persist and leaves sponsors without a reason to invest. High-performance sport cannot live on a few peak weeks each year.

Looking at other sports, the lesson is clear. Vietnamese athletics had shining individuals, but only when the mass running movement exploded in recent years did the base truly thicken. Swimming needs such a movement too: pools in schools, clubs in cities, and competitions a normal child can dream about. When enough people swim, good swimmers appear on their own. Probability does not love anyone, but it rewards bases wide enough.

I think about the road I have walked. There is a line I keep as a reminder: “Huyền crossed the finish line, and I crossed the boundary of my own profession.” The day I watched a Vietnamese athlete touch the wall with a medal around her neck, I understood that the writer, too, must cross a boundary — between recording results and understanding the price behind them.

So instead of asking when Vietnam will have another Ánh Viên, perhaps we should ask a different question: how many pools have we built for children in the past ten years? The answer to the second determines the answer to the first. And perhaps, when enough children can swim without fearing the far bank, we will no longer need to wait for a miracle at all.

Swimming is not measured by the distance from the starting block to the wall. It is measured by the distance from a child to their dream. That distance is longer than any length in the record book.