Vietnamese Swimmers Against the Current: Stop Searching for a Second Anh Vien

Every Saturday morning, I walk five hundred meters from home to the Son Tra district pool. At six a.m., the water is still covered by a thin haze, and the ripples made by swimmers entering the pool stretch out like cursive strokes on a blue glass sheet. I have worked as a swimming commentator for more than five years, spending hours watching replays of every touch, every breath, every underwater moment. But that morning I was not there to take notes. I was there to recover a sound that awakened me in my early days as a journalist: the sound of water weeping. That defining morning happened in June 2026, when I was assigned to commentate the national swimming and finswimming championship in Da Nang. The stands were nearly empty due to the pandemic. I noticed a thirteen-year-old boy crouching beside a plastic bag of wet clothes. He was not a competitor; he was the son of the pool's security guard. As the seniors swam the 400m freestyle final, the boy stood close to the fence, moving his lips as if counting every stroke. I approached him and asked, "What are you counting?" He answered: "Uncle, that man pulled his arms thirty-seven times just to complete one length, but I counted four times he turned to breathe." I froze. A child who had never learned proper swimming had noticed what I, a commentator, had missed: swimming is not about speed, it is about breath. That mistake taught me to read the world one breath slower. Vietnamese swimming once lived through the Anh Vien fever. Nguyen Thi Anh Vien, born in 2026, collected twenty-five SEA Games gold medals from 2026 to 2026, and made history with an A-cut to the 200m freestyle at the Rio 2026 Olympics. She became an icon, an answer to the question: can Vietnamese people swim fast? When she retired, many panicked at the vast empty space on the results table. But few noticed that beneath her glory years, a new generation of swimmers was quietly growing up in remote provinces. Nguyen Huy Hoang, born in 2026 in Quang Binh, secured Olympic Tokyo 2026 standards in the 800m and 1500m freestyle. Tran Hung Nguyen, born in 2026, broke the national record in the 200m individual medley at just fourteen years old. They did not have the look of media-crowned heroes, but they were writing the next chapter with quiet numbers. At the 32nd SEA Games in Cambodia in May 2026, the Vietnamese swimming team remained among the top three nations in the region. People called it a result of succession, but I believed it was a result of a changed mindset. Anh Vien no longer had to carry the entire team on her shoulders; instead, each swimmer had a role, each focus area had its own roadmap. Huy Hoang took charge of long-distance events, Hung Nguyen developed toward medley and butterfly, Vo Thi My Tien and Pham Thi Thu Hang reinforced the women's breaststroke. That division of roles sounds obvious, but it was actually the outcome of a quiet revolution inside the offices of the Vietnam Aquatic Sports Federation. I spent years following their training sessions to understand why Vietnamese swimming could maintain results without a single dominant superstar. The answer lies in the numbers that outsiders rarely see. In the 1500m freestyle, a world-class swimmer usually maintains a stroke rate of thirty-two to thirty-four strokes per minute. Huy Hoang consistently hits this range in distance sets, but the key is stability: he does not sprint the first two hundred meters and then fade in the last five hundred. His technique is built on the negative split principle – swimming the second half faster than the first. Watching his SEA Games 31 replay, I counted twenty-seven strokes for a 50-meter lap, maintained all the way to the touch. It was not astonishing speed but amazing economy: every stroke entered the water as if lifting the body, not sinking too deep, not rising too high. Tran Hung Nguyen brings a different story. The boy born in 2026 stands 1m77, an ideal height for a medley swimmer. What impresses me most is his ability to switch between four strokes without losing his feel for the water. In medley, transitions are everything: from butterfly to backstroke, backstroke to breaststroke, breaststroke to freestyle. Each turn forces the body to change its entire breathing cycle. Many swimmers lose close to a second per turn because of poor body position. Hung Nguyen, thanks to coach Nguyen Dang Khoa who trained his underwater technique from age twelve, takes only about 0.4 seconds for each breakout. That number seems tiny, but multiplied by three turns it creates a one-second advantage – the distance between gold and bronze. I often tell young colleagues that swimming is a sport of repetition. A 1500m swimmer performs about sixty stroke cycles per length, roughly fifteen hundred strokes in a race. If each stroke is off by half a degree, the accumulated error reaches 750 degrees, creating enormous drag. That is why Vietnamese coaches do not overemphasize short sprints; they spend most of the time on fundamentals: sculling, pulling, rolling, touching. I once watched Huy Hoang's group at the Da Nang National Sports Training Center, where swimmers spent a full hour practicing only starting dives and underwater glides. An outsider might think it boring. But that boredom builds water feel – the most valuable asset a swimmer can own. The story of water feel leads me to a blind spot that the media often ignores. When Nguyen Thi Anh Vien rose, Vietnamese sports poured resources into her alone: a long training camp in America, a personal plan, foreign experts. The result was a string of gold medals, but it also created a wrong mindset: to win medals, you must make a superstar. When Anh Vien retired, the team staggered. Immediately we began the search for a second Anh Vien, placing on a fifteen-year-old's shoulders the pressure of an entire generation. I believe that is the most dangerous blind spot in our sports strategy. Look at Singapore. The island nation once had Joseph Schooling, the only Southeast Asian to win Olympic gold in swimming. But after his retirement, Singapore swimming did not collapse. They remain the regional No.1 power because they built a club system across schools, where a six-year-old learns to swim not to become an athlete but to learn to love the water. From there, they select the truly gifted, train them methodically for years, and accept a generation without medals but with methods. They do not search for a second Schooling; they build a machine that can produce new Schoolings. In contrast, we always want to pick the fruit before planting the tree. I recall a 2026 afternoon sitting with an old coach in Quang Binh who had mentored Huy Hoang from the beginning. He told me that when Huy Hoang was fifteen, Quang Binh's team did not have a single electronic stopwatch. Coaches had to use old inherited wristwatches, each pressing at different times, then averaging. Remarkably, none of them gave up. They wrote every session in notebooks and submitted them to the federation each year for expert analysis. Those raw data, through the hands of sports specialists, became the basis for adjusting each athlete's training plan. Huy Hoang was not the product of a modern training center but of persistence and passion. That gave me hope: we do not need huge sums to build swimming; we need honesty in every number. So why do we still search for a hero? Because heroes sell newspapers, and a story about a poor child overcoming hardship easily goes viral. But high-performance sport does not follow a television script. A strong swimming nation is not measured by the number of gold medals at the SEA Games, but by the number of children who can swim safely, by the number of clubs with properly trained coaches, by the number of parents who take their kids to the pool as a habit, not as a gamble. When we ask, "Where is the second Anh Vien?", we ignore thousands of children swimming their first laps in district pools – children who may never reach the top but will become the foundation of a new generation. I once asked a national youth talent scout in 2026 what he looked for to identify swimming talent. He replied: "I don't look at performance; I look at the legs." A child with natural kick tempo and great ankle flexibility is often more gifted than a tall child who is lazy with the legs. It sounds counterintuitive, but it is the philosophy of swimming powers: they select based on biological potential, not on current results. This approach avoids training the wrong people and builds a deep reserve pool. Meanwhile, our scouts are often pressured to find an immediate star to fill an empty slot, so they pick early bloomers who later hit a psychological wall during puberty. The puberty barrier is a term experts often speak about, but the public hardly knows it. It occurs when the body grows rapidly, weight increases, and strength has not yet caught up, causing young athletes to lose water feel and plateau. For females, this barrier can be more severe due to hormonal changes that alter fat distribution and buoyancy. Many young Vietnamese swimmers encounter this and are cast aside because of dropping times, when in fact they are going through a normal physiological phase. Without long-term monitoring, we risk losing real talent exactly when they need support most. We also need to talk about numbers in the gym. Very few Vietnamese swimming training centers have full physiology testing rooms. Coaches often judge training intensity by feel and by taking pulse manually. Meanwhile, teams in Australia and the US use continuous lactate analyzers after every set to determine each swimmer's anaerobic threshold. This difference means we often train by guess: some athletes overtrain and get injured, some under-train and never adapt. I do not oppose foreign training camps, but I believe investing in physiology testing equipment at home will bring much longer-lasting value than a few short overseas camps. The story of Vietnamese swimming lacks no heartwarming moments. I still remember the 200m medley final at SEA Games 32, when Tran Hung Nguyen touched and looked at the scoreboard with disbelief. That sixteen-year-old had just defeated multi-time SEA Games champions, though before the meet he was only introduced as a promising face. In that moment, I remembered the boy counting breaths at the Son Tra pool. Water does not lie, but it teaches people to listen. And those who truly listen to the water – Huy Hoang, Hung Nguyen, and hundreds of children being taught to swim in localities – do not need to become a second Anh Vien. They only need to become themselves, with a lane and a dream. I often end my journalism workshops with an exercise: write about the last finisher in a race. That person may be left behind, but their race is no less meaningful. Why do they swim? What did they overcome to stand at the starting blocks? Swimmers do not need glory; they need a lane to return to themselves. If we only look up at the peak, we will miss countless stories unfolding beneath the surface – where passion is forged in every stroke. Perhaps it is time to change how we tell the story of swimming. Instead of asking, "Who will be the second Anh Vien?", let us ask, "How can a child in a remote area learn to swim properly?" That shift in perspective will not create a superstar immediately, but it will create a generation of swimmers with foundation, with method, and with endurance. When that happens, finding a new Anh Vien will become a natural outcome, not the only goal. Vietnamese swimming needs a quiet revolution, starting from communal pools, from the patience of coaches, from the trust of parents. People say 2–1 is a score, but in swimming the score is written in hundredths of a second. One hundredth of a second can make one swimmer a legend and another forgotten. But what I care about is not the numbers on the scoreboard, but the moment an athlete lifts her head after touching, searching for the coach's eyes to confirm she gave everything to the lane. That is the symphony that only those who know how to listen to the water can feel. As I left the Son Tra pool that morning, I met the counting boy again. He was seventeen now, a swimmer on the district youth team. He proudly showed me a silver medal from a city meet. I asked if he wanted to become a second Anh Vien. He laughed: "I just want to swim fast enough so my mother does not have to sell lottery tickets." I realized that the greatest things in sports always begin with very ordinary desires. And Vietnamese swimming, fortunately, still has many children like him – seeds waiting to be nurtured by a system that listens instead of simply hunting for stars. Will we be patient enough to wait? The answer lies in how we treat every child who steps into a pool today. The water does not lie, but it keeps many secrets. People can only uncover them if they are calm enough to listen. I heard the water weep once, and it changed how I do my job. Now I want to tell that story, not to glorify myself, but to remind everyone that out there, children are still counting every stroke of those who finish, still nurturing a very small but very persistent dream. Vietnamese swimming will be strong when each of those children is seen, guided, and believed in. That is what all swimming lovers should aim for, above any medal.