After Anh Vien: Vietnamese Swimming and the Long-Course Problem Ahead of the 2026 Asian Games

After Anh Vien: Vietnamese Swimming and the Long-Course Problem Ahead of the 2026 Asian Games On a late July morning in 2026, inside La Défense Arena, I stood in the mixed zone waiting for the athletes to walk past. The men's 1,500-metre freestyle heats had just ended. Nguyen Huy Hoang climbed out of the water, took off his goggles, and did something almost nobody noticed: he stood still, turned his head toward the scoreboard for exactly three seconds, and only then walked toward the interview area. No slapping the water. No shaking his head. No forced smile. Just three seconds. I don't read the record board. I read the lane in their eyes. In those three seconds I saw a swimmer measuring himself against a standard he knows he has not reached, and knows precisely what that gap is made of. He is no longer afraid of it. Two years later, as Vietnamese swimming enters the final stretch toward the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, that moment is still the one I keep. It is not a story about a medal. It is a story about a system. A cycle with no shield For roughly fifteen years, Vietnamese swimming lived in a peculiar state: every international expectation rested on one person. Nguyen Thi Anh Vien carried more than twenty SEA Games gold medals, three Olympic appearances, and the entire media burden of an aquatics programme. When she left the pool after the 2026 SEA Games on home soil, what Vietnam lost was not a swimmer. It was a shield. Since then the national team has been rebuilding. Nguyen Huy Hoang became the anchor in distance events. Tran Hung Nguyen took on the individual medley. Pham Thanh Bao and a younger group pushed into relay line-ups. But the squad remains thin: in many events Vietnam has one or two athletes capable of reaching a regional final. The calendar offers no slack. The 2026 SEA Games in Thailand served as a general rehearsal. The 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya is the real test. And behind it, qualification planning for Los Angeles 2028 has already entered the training programmes. What interests me is not who wins a medal in Nagoya. What interests me is the unit Vietnam is using to measure its own distance. Globally, the standard is being pushed at both ends. Léon Marchand won four gold medals at Paris 2026 across the medley and butterfly events, with near-flawless turning mechanics. Pan Zhanle set the 100-metre freestyle world record at 46.40 seconds, in an event where every hundredth is decided by the start and a single turn. On the distance side, Katie Ledecky still holds the 1,500-metre freestyle world record at 15:20.48 and the 800-metre freestyle world record at 8:04.79 — marks that have stood for nearly a decade. These athletes share no nationality. They share a technical language. Twenty-nine seconds, and where they sit The men's 1,500-metre freestyle world record remains 14:31.02, set by Sun Yang in London in 2026. The best mark in Vietnamese swimming history over this distance sits around the 15-minute mark. The gap is roughly 29 seconds. The gap itself says little. What matters is how it is distributed. I sat down with footage of the fourteen turns in a long-course 1,500-metre race, compared a Vietnamese swimmer against the world's leading group, and split those 29 seconds into components. Not to find a culprit, but to find an order of priority. The first component sits in the start and the opening 15 metres. The leading group leaves the wall with a dolphin kick phase under the surface, holding glide almost to the 15-metre mark before breaking out into a long freestyle stroke. A Vietnamese swimmer typically surfaces earlier, around metres eleven or twelve. The difference in this segment alone runs to about a second and a half. That sounds small. It is a second and a half lost before the race has really begun. The second component, and by far the largest, sits in the fourteen turns. The economics of a turn Call it a turn tax. On every wall touch, a swimmer has three jobs to complete within two to three seconds: change direction, generate propulsion, and maintain the glide line. The world's leading group fuses all three into one continuous motion — the feet hit the wall as the shoulders begin to rotate, and the first dolphin kick lands while the body is still perfectly extended. In a swimmer who has not refined this, the three jobs separate. A small dead spot appears as the body changes axis. Measured on video, that dead spot typically runs 0.25 to 0.35 seconds per turn. Multiplied across fourteen turns in a long-course 1,500 metres, that is three to five seconds. Add the second and a half lost at the start, and close to seven of the 29 seconds are accounted for. The rest sits in stroke efficiency at pace — where stroke rate and distance per stroke must balance rather than cancel each other out. This is why I tell young coaches not to teach children to swim fast. Teach them to turn correctly. The hurdler does not ask how high the hurdle is. Only where the finish line is. I borrow that line from track and field, and I borrow it deliberately. In the fourteen turns of a 1,500-metre swim there is a logic identical to ten hurdles in a 110-metre hurdles race. Both are rhythmic structures: a sequence of points where the athlete must briefly interrupt linear motion to change state, then return to linear motion without losing speed. Good hurdlers do not run fast between hurdles. They run fast through hurdles. The same holds in distance swimming: the gap is created at the wall, not in the middle of the pool. At a training session I was allowed to observe at a southern training centre, the coach had young swimmers cover 25 metres, stop, and repeat thirty times. Nobody timed the swimming. They timed only the interval from foot contact with the wall to the head breaking the surface. The threshold was 0.9 seconds. I sat there for three hours. That drill has been standard in the programmes of leading swimming nations for fifteen years, and it is still not widespread across most centres in the region. The underwater phase and the 15-metre trap World Aquatics rules limit underwater travel after each start and each turn to 15 metres from the wall. In backstroke events the regulation is especially strict. A common misreading exists in regional youth programmes: the 15-metre rule is read as a ceiling, meaning the less underwater work the safer. The opposite is true. Fifteen metres is an allocated space, and leading swimming nations use nearly all of it on almost every turn. Underwater dolphin kicking burns oxygen faster than surface freestyle, so it only pays off when the glide distance is long enough to offset the cost. For a swimmer with undeveloped mechanics, forcing dolphin kicks to 15 metres backfires: they surface with heart rate already at threshold and lose the efficiency of the next twenty metres. The line between advantage and self-harm sits in the quality of the first push-off. That is why turning drills must be taught before speed drills, not after. In medley events, the heaviest tax is the stroke transition Tran Hung Nguyen is a notable case in the individual medley. A 200-metre medley has four 50-metre legs and three stroke transitions. The backstroke-to-breaststroke change is the most expensive, because the swimmer must shift from a supine torso axis to a prone one while completely restructuring propulsion. I separately timed these three transitions in one swim by a world-leading athlete and one by a Southeast Asian athlete over the same distance. The difference at the third transition reached nearly four-tenths of a second. In an event where eight finalists can fit inside one and a half seconds, four-tenths is a canyon. The technical lesson is clear: medley events do not reward the best swimmer in any single stroke. They reward whoever is least bad in their weakest stroke. Regional programmes often do the opposite — pouring time into the strongest stroke because it delivers the fastest sense of progress. The arena outside the pool One detail is rarely mentioned in performance discussions: the geometry of the pool system. Vietnam has very few competition-standard 50-metre pools. Most domestic training centres operate in 25-metre water. The impact reaches beyond event familiarity. It shapes the entire structure of a training programme. An athlete training in a 25-metre pool performs twice as many turns over the same distance. That sounds like an advantage for turning mechanics. The price is rhythm. A long-course 1,500-metre race contains only fourteen turns. A swimmer habituated to the dense turning rhythm of short-course water enters a distance race with a distorted sense of tempo and often lifts stroke rate too early. This is a structural disadvantage, and it cannot be fixed by individual effort. It can only be fixed by infrastructure. The paradox of a swimming nation In 2026, I began working as a swimming reporter for a domestic newspaper. My first assignment was not a championship. It was child drowning. Fifteen years later the picture has changed substantially. Learn-to-swim and drowning-prevention programmes have entered schools in many provinces, and the share of children who can swim has risen. But here is the paradox. A country investing heavily in teaching children to swim safely is struggling to convert that investment into an elite development system. The two goals require two different kinds of coach. A water-safety instructor needs pedagogy and rescue instinct. An athlete-development coach needs biomechanics, exercise physiology, and video analysis. In Vietnam those roles are usually merged into one person, and that person rarely has time for the second role. The largest gap in Vietnamese swimming is not in the pool. It is in the classroom where coaches are trained. Singapore's shadow and Thailand's rise In Southeast Asia, Singapore still leads on system depth. It has competition-standard short-course and long-course infrastructure, an academy structure tied to schools, and, more importantly, a continuous development pipeline from junior level to the national team. Thailand has made gains in recent years in backstroke and butterfly, partly by hiring foreign specialists on long-term contracts rather than short training camps. Indonesia and Malaysia are also investing in training centres equipped for video analysis. Vietnam is not outside this trend, but its rate of conversion is slower. Partly because resources are spread across many sports. Partly because the evaluation culture in the sector still leans toward short-term competition results over long-term development indicators. I trust intuition, but I have learned to let intuition wait for data. In 2026, in Bangkok, I was accused of making things up when I wrote about a hurdler using an odd stride pattern that broke with the standard everyone around me believed in. Three months later he broke the national record using exactly that pattern. I tell this story not to show off intuition. I tell it to say that intuition only has value when it is allowed to wait for data. A judgement about a 16-year-old at a junior meet may be right, but it only becomes knowledge when verified by fourteen turns, three stroke transitions, and a development curve measured in years. Vietnamese swimming needs exactly that kind of patience at system level. The contrarian angle: SEA Games medals are a biased test This is where I will not win friends inside the sector. SEA Games results are always the primary yardstick in end-of-cycle reports. But the SEA Games is a very particular arena: it concentrates on a narrow geography, and in many swimming events the competitive density does not reflect world standards. A SEA Games final berth in some events can correspond to a world ranking outside the top 40. When a system makes SEA Games medals its number-one target, it optimises for what is easiest to win. That means short events, low-density events, and athletes already at their peak. The result is that squad depth does not grow, and the 16-to-19 age group — the group that decides the next Asian Games cycle — is left behind in basic development programmes. There is a subtler second consequence. Optimising for the SEA Games encourages short-term solutions: tapering for exactly one meet a year instead of building a multi-peak training cycle. Athletes developed under a single-peak model often struggle once they enter a dense international calendar. I am not saying SEA Games medals are meaningless. I am saying they are a biased test, and using them as the sole target pushes a system to optimise in the wrong place. What should be measured, and what is being measured Instead of medal counts, there are five indicators a serious swimming system should track. The first is the average time of the 14-to-17 age group in core events, benchmarked against regional standards. This predicts far better than the results of the current national squad. The next is the number of athletes capable of reaching a continental final in each event. An event with only one qualifier is a high-risk event. Then comes the conversion rate from talented school-age swimmers to the national team — an indicator that measures the quality of the pipeline, not the quality of a few individuals. After that is the number of video-analysis hours each coach can access per month. And the indicator I consider most important: the number of properly trained coaches produced each year. I have read many end-of-cycle federation reports across the region. The first four indicators appear occasionally. The last one almost never does. Where the flame is In 2026, while every competition was suspended and stadiums stood empty, I wrote a deeply pessimistic piece about the future of the sport I follow. Two weeks later I came across a short video of a young athlete training alone on a dirt road, with no coach, only a stopwatch and a notebook. I flew there with my own money and stayed eight days. The flame of 2026 was relit by a girl nobody had noticed. That lesson still holds for Vietnamese swimming right now. Most of the athletes Vietnam will rely on in Nagoya in 2026 were already inside the system in 2026. But the ones who will carry the team in Los Angeles in 2028 are currently 14 and 15 years old, training somewhere. If the system only looks at Nagoya, it will not see them. A crisis only takes away the arena, not the trajectory. Something I learned after years of reporting on both shores: sporting nations do not collapse because a competition is postponed. They collapse because they stop training coaches for two consecutive years. A swimmer's trajectory is drawn from the age of ten. If nobody is standing in the right place during that window to correct a turn angle that is three degrees off, every later investment is an investment in repairs. Gaps of that kind never show up on a scoreboard. They show up at the fourteenth second of a swim. What I will look for in Aichi-Nagoya I will be in Nagoya in September 2026, and I know what I will be looking for. I will not only look at where Vietnamese swimmers finish. I will watch their starts against the swimmers beside them. I will watch their legs in the first two seconds after the wall touch. I will watch how long they stay underwater. And I will count how many young swimmers appear in the heats, not only in the finals. If the 29-second gap narrows to 24, I will know the turning drills are being taught properly. If three Vietnamese swimmers reach the heats of the same event, I will know the development pipeline is working. If only one familiar name appears and the rest remain absent, then every investment of the past four years has gone somewhere that does not pay. Swimming is the loneliest sport I have ever covered. Nobody passes you the ball; nobody blocks for you. Every twenty-five metres you have only water and yourself. But that is in the water. On land, no swimmer grows up alone. Behind every lane there is a coach who knows when to press the stopwatch, a centre with enough pool time to train the right rhythm, and a system willing to measure the things that never get a medal. Vietnam has already proven it can produce outstanding swimmers. What remains for this cycle is whether the country can produce a system good enough not to need luck.