Nguyen Thi Oanh's Four Golds and the Unmeasured Gap on Vietnam's Women's Track

The stadium clock at Morodok Techo in Phnom Penh read 17:41 when Nguyen Thi Oanh crossed the line in the women's 5,000m. Forty-five minutes later, the area around the warm-up track outside the main stadium was nearly empty. Two Cambodian volunteers were rolling up lane ropes; a cart carrying ice tubs rolled past; the metal seats behind the 200m start line held just three people — an older man holding a red flag with a yellow star, a photographer cleaning a lens, and a woman in a national team jacket writing in a small notebook. I was in the fourth row, exactly where the seats had been packed ten minutes earlier as the men's sprinters prepared to enter the blocks.

I record that detail to measure something else: the order of priority. Same track, same afternoon, same ticket, and people stay for speed while leaving before endurance. That distribution of attention repeats at almost every athletics meet I have covered, from provincial stadiums in Vietnam to continental championships. It does not measure the ability of female athletes. It measures how we define a performance worth staying for.

A beautiful Games and the silences behind it

According to the official results of SEA Games 32 in Phnom Penh in May 2026, Nguyen Thi Oanh won four gold medals: 1,500m, 3,000m steeplechase, 5,000m and the women's 4x400m relay. She became the first Vietnamese athlete in the history of the Games to win four golds at a single edition. That achievement deserved the front page, and it got the front page.

But a medal table only records the surface. It does not record the following morning, when Oanh had to warm up under a roofed area because the asphalt outside the stadium smelled of heat in the May sun. It does not record that the 1,500m and the 3,000m steeplechase were scheduled on the same day, hours apart — a schedule any strength coach would call brutal. And it does not record who the four names in the 4x400m relay were, what each of them ran, or what happens if one of them cannot recover in time.

I have followed athletics for nineteen years, several of them spent alongside women's football and long conversations at trackside. My experience says something simple: every major Games leaves two kinds of data. The first is medals, which everyone sees. The second is squad depth, which only those still sitting in the stands after the closing ceremony can see.

Two distances, one afternoon, one body

The fact that Oanh ran the 1,500m and the 3,000m steeplechase on the same day is the most analytically interesting point of the whole Games, and also the most overlooked. The two events draw on different energy systems. The 1,500m is a glycolytic race: high speed, sharp rises in blood lactate, legs that feel heavy for about twenty minutes after the finish. The 3,000m steeplechase is an oxidative race combined with jumping power: seven and a half laps, four barriers per lap, plus a water jump. Every water jump landing loads one leg with force many times body weight.

Put the two together and the recovery problem has no perfect solution. The body needs roughly two to four hours to clear lactate and partially reload muscle glycogen, while the window between the events is shorter than that. What remains is neuromuscular management, hydration, electrolytes and pain tolerance. For a 28-year-old athlete, that is the boundary between performance and injury.

In nineteen years in the stands, I have seen only a handful of coaching staffs dare to schedule that way for a lead athlete. The reason usually given is "there is nobody else". That phrase sounds like praise for versatility, but it is also a confession about depth. A team with depth does not need to place the entire medal hope of a sport on one person across two consecutive afternoons.

Forty-five minutes at the edge of the field, a lifetime that never grows old. I learned that line on an evening in 2026, after the opening match of the National Women's Football Championship in Thanh Hoa, when midfielder Nguyen Thi Tuyet Dung avoided the cameras out of shyness and I sat with her for forty-five minutes listening to stories about her family in Tuyen Quang and late dinners after training. In that same span of time in Phnom Penh, Oanh sat on a plastic bench with her legs in an ice tub, looking toward a track whose lights had gone out. In both cases, the most valuable material was not on the results sheet.

The baton and the four names

The women's 4x400m relay is where I want to linger, because that is where the nature of a track programme shows itself most clearly. Relay running does not reward raw speed. It rewards reliability. Four runners cover 400m each, entering the exchange zone twice, and each exchange tests cadence, timing and composure under pursuit.

At SEA Games 32, Vietnam's women's relay won. But its structure is what worries me. One leg was carried by an athlete also racing individual events the same day, while the other three had to run near career bests to hold the gap. If any of them had trouble with a hamstring, a foot, or simply failed to recover from the heats, the whole quartet loses its claim. The baton in the hand does not create the runner. The runner must already exist.

Look at the region's track programmes and the difference sits here. Thailand and the Philippines have long built groups of 400m and 400m hurdlers deep enough to rotate between editions without losing performance. They have four, five, six names at a similar level, competing domestically before going regional. Vietnam in the same period has usually had one or two athletes at standard, with the rest slotted in to complete a team.

That dependence shapes leg selection. When a team has one clearly superior runner, coaches tend to place her on the anchor leg to finish ahead, or on the second leg to break the field early. Both choices are correct in a specific race, and both reduce the development of the other three, because they are never handed responsibility for the outcome. A mature track programme is measured by how many people can run the deciding leg, not by how many medals the deciding leg has won.

Empty seats in the youth stands

In Vietnam, national youth athletics meets are usually held in provincial stadiums seating a few thousand. I have sat in those stands for days at a time and counted the spectators on two hands. More telling is who they are: mostly parents, the athletes' own coaches, and a few retired athletes. Outsiders are almost absent.

When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices become leaders. I remember a female coach in a central province who teaches physical education at a high school by day and, in the afternoons, takes her students to run on the concrete roads of a residential area because the district stadium is not regularly open. She is the person who sent three students to the national youth team in five years. No news bulletin has ever written about her. Yet Vietnam's supply of female athletes comes mainly from people like her.

If we want a women's 4x400m relay with depth, the road starts here, not in the stands of a major Games. The number of female entrants in middle-distance and 400m events aged fifteen to seventeen is a far better predictor than the SEA Games medal count, because that age group needs another five to seven years to reach peak form.

I once saw this problem from another angle. In 2026, while the whole newsroom poured itself into the World Cup in Russia, I was assigned women's football and wrote a long tactical piece on what women's teams could take from the shapes men's teams used in the group stage. The piece drew two compliments and eleven critical comments from male colleagues who thought I had wasted a World Cup. It later reached the women's national team coaching staff and was used as reference material. In the stands in Russia, I heard many empty seats named after women. The gap was not in the audience. It was in who gets asked for an opinion.

Competitive value and commercial value

This is where I want to say plainly what many in the trade avoid: women's athletics events are mispriced, but not in the direction the campaigns usually claim. The problem is not that audiences refuse to watch women compete. The problem is that organisers schedule women's events in low-attendance slots, decline live coverage, build no pre-event narrative, and then use the resulting low audience figures to justify doing it again.

Reading a scoreboard, I learned to read what is not written on it. A women's event scheduled on a weekday morning will always draw fewer spectators than a men's event on a weekend evening, and that comparison means nothing professionally. Yet it is used to allocate bonuses, sponsorship and broadcast minutes in the following season. The loop feeds itself.

For athletes, the consequences are concrete. A medal bonus is point income: it arrives once and stops. A personal sponsorship contract is what sustains a career, and that contract depends on the visibility of the whole sport. A steeplechaser who wins gold may earn far less than an athlete in a sport with big crowds, even though the training load and injury risk are comparable.

I do not argue that commercial value should automatically equal competitive value. But when the gap grows so wide that an athlete considers retiring at twenty-eight because she cannot make a living, the question has left media and entered policy.

When injury becomes an exam

There is a habit in how we report on women returning from injury that I consider cruel: demanding that they prove themselves in their very first competition back. Headlines ask whether they still have form, whether last year's medal was luck. That pressure pushes athletes back onto the track earlier than medical staff advise and raises the risk of re-injury.

In sports physiology, tendons and ligaments need considerably longer to heal than muscle. An athlete can feel well before connective tissue can actually tolerate peak load. That feeling of wellness coincides with the approach of major championships, and that is the formula behind the Achilles ruptures and meniscus tears we call occupational accidents.

A fairer approach gives an athlete a staged pathway with clear milestones, where the first comeback is judged by the volume of competition completed rather than the finishing position. It sounds less dramatic, and it is less dramatic. But it keeps the runner in the sport for another five years.

2026 and the lesson of telling someone else's story

In 2026, almost all competitions were cancelled and the income of female athletes fell close to zero. While most newsrooms circled the crisis of men's events, I started a project inviting twelve former internationals to tell their own journeys. It ran six months and reached about two million reads on a local platform. Three athletes did not agree to speak publicly about unequal bonuses. I held three online meetings and offered a compromise: hide identities, keep the content.

The result exceeded the original plan. Their stories became data that one federation used to adjust support policy. But the lesson I kept was about craft: when a subject agrees to speak, the writer agrees to lose control of the story. Every draft in that project went back to its subject before publication. It slowed things down, and I think that slowness is far cheaper than losing the trust of a generation of female athletes.

What is changing and what is not

There are some positive movements I have observed in the past two years. National-level athletics meets are getting more live coverage, though the picture quality and camera choices are far from matching how compelling the women's events actually are. A few provinces have placed women's athletics among priority youth development sports, meaning dedicated scholarships and nutrition budgets. The number of female coaches earning second and third-tier certifications is rising, slowly but rising.

In another direction, some female athletes building their own channels to talk about training and injury has changed how information reaches audiences. Previously, their entire story passed through a writer. Now they can speak directly, which is good for both sides, because writers are forced to do better than mere translation.

What has not changed is the structure of competitions and the structure of prize money. As long as women's events sit in low-attendance slots, and as long as sponsorship for a sport depends on a few individual medals rather than the appeal of the whole competition system, the order of priority I counted in the stands in Phnom Penh will remain in place.

In women's football there are no days off, only stories not yet told. The same holds on the track. Each of Oanh's golds is the product of ten years of training nobody filmed, of morning runs on the dykes of Bac Giang, of a coach paying phone bills to call a student at night. Those stories never appear on the medal table, and they are the deciding part.

What I expect to happen

If provinces sustain the current pace of investment in the fifteen-to-seventeen age group, Vietnam could have a group of three to four female athletes at standard in the 400m and 400m hurdles within five to seven years. The women's 4x400m relay would then no longer depend on one runner doubling on the same day, and we would remove one injury boundary zone.

Conversely, if future Games continue to be read through individual medal counts while the rest is left unfinished, the supply will stay thin and we will keep watching our best athletes used as emergency services. A clean baton exchange needs four healthy runners. There is no other way.