Nguyen Thi Oanh, Four SEA Games 32 Golds and the Unpaid Ledger of Vietnamese Women's Athletics

Phnom Penh, May 2026. I sat in a small studio in Saigon, eyes fixed on the SEA Games 32 livestream. Around me, colleagues called out the names of male athletes. I waited for a woman barely over five feet tall to step up to the start line. When she bent forward, I saw the muscles tighten in her calves, the bandage wrapped around her knee, and the way she set her spikes on the track as if counting every metre of ground. People saw a race; I saw a body paying off a debt. Nguyen Thi Oanh, born in 2026 in Bac Giang Province, is a familiar face in the athletics programme of the People's Public Security force. She runs middle and long distances: the 1500m, the 3000m steeplechase, the 5000m and the 10,000m. At SEA Games 32 in Cambodia she won four gold medals. What kept me in my seat until the broadcast ended was the way she rationed her strength lap by lap, not the medal count. At 63, I have followed Vietnamese women's athletics for more than four decades. I remember the years when a women's track gold was treated as an oddity, printed on the front page and then quietly forgotten within days. I remember standing at Thong Nhat Stadium, hearing a crowd so thin that you could hear spikes biting into the track. Vietnamese women's athletics has always lived on a handful of names. A handful of names carrying an entire discipline. Where does that ledger begin? At the SEA Games, athletics is the gold mine of the Vietnamese delegation. But that mine is worked by a small group of athletes, most of them women. While men's football has a full professional league, sponsors and broadcast deals, athletics survives on state budgets and prize money that will not buy a motorbike. A SEA Games gold medal carries a state award of a few tens of millions of dong. That sounds like a lot. Now divide it across four years of training, across every five a.m. wake-up, across every injury that no sports insurance fully covers. I keep asking myself: who is profiting from their sweat? Now let us talk about the craft, because that is the part I want readers to look at closely. Running the 1500m and running the 3000m steeplechase are two different problems. The 1500m is a race of sustained speed and a final kick. The 3000m steeplechase is a race of rhythm: five barriers per lap, one of them with a water pit. An athlete has to clear each barrier without breaking her breathing pattern. The technique of landing after the water pit decides how much she has left for the final three laps. Nguyen Thi Oanh is not the type to burn everything in the first two hundred metres. She runs with her head. She picks a position in the lead group, holds the rhythm, then accelerates late. That approach saves energy but places the entire burden on the closing sprint, where the body is already empty. For an athlete racing several events in a single Games, that is a gamble. What stands out is that she ran four events in one SEA Games, with rest windows between them so short they are hard to believe. Physiologically, the body needs dozens of hours to refill muscle glycogen and clear lactic acid. She did not have dozens of hours. She had a few, a bottle of water, and a will. I have replayed the footage of that session many times. In the final metres of her last event, her shoulders tilted hard to one side. The technique was not pretty. It was the technique of someone telling her own body: hold on for thirty more seconds. Every time she reaches the finish line, a prejudice cracks. The prejudice that women cannot handle heavy training loads. The prejudice that women's athletics is a minor event. The prejudice that an athlete with an underlying illness should stop. Nguyen Thi Oanh has a kidney condition. She still trained, still competed, still won. The media tells that story as an inspiring legend. I tell it differently. An athlete has to compete through pain, and we call it inspiration. I am not sure that is something to be proud of. When a system lacks doctors, lacks nutritionists, lacks the money to let athletes rest at the right moment, endurance becomes a shield for scarcity. I do not want the next generation to look at Nguyen Thi Oanh and think that winning means running on tears. The "superwoman" story is easy to sell. It gives the audience a warm feeling, gives sponsors a clean image, and gives the apparatus a reason not to change. But behind the medal there are other women athletes who are never named. They train in provincial towns. They pay for food and lodging out of a thin wage. They retire at 25 with no fallback career. One person's gold medal is a curtain drawn over hundreds of others. That is why I do not write about legends. I write about structures. In Southeast Asia, women's athletics is a contest among three countries: Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. Thailand has sports academies and physical-education universities investing methodically. The Philippines naturalises foreign-born athletes to reinforce its squad. Vietnam wins through a small set of outstanding individuals, scouted from the provinces and brought into national training centres. That approach works on the medal table but is fragile in depth. If one athlete is injured, an entire event can be left empty. At SEA Games 31 on home soil in Hanoi in 2026, she was already a pillar of the Vietnamese athletics team. A year later, in Cambodia, she was again the athlete entered in the most events. That says two things: she is excellent, and behind her there are not enough people to share the load. A healthy national team does not pile every expectation onto one pair of legs. I once visited a provincial training centre in summer. The running surface was a packed-dirt loop, with no synthetic track. The girls ran barefoot, and the coach timed them by hand. Among them there might be the next Nguyen Thi Oanh. But for that girl to reach the SEA Games, she needs a long road that a provincial centre cannot afford to build. Vietnamese women's athletics is not short on talent. It is short on roads. Placed side by side, the gap is plain. A male footballer in the domestic league can earn tens of millions of dong a month, plus match bonuses, plus endorsement deals. A SEA Games champion in women's athletics may receive a one-off award and then return to the daily training routine. No image contracts. No royalties. A medal, and a road ahead she must still cover on her own. An athlete has to compete through pain, and we call it inspiration. I am not sure that is something to be proud of. When a system lacks doctors, lacks nutritionists, lacks the money to let athletes rest at the right moment, endurance becomes a shield for scarcity. I do not want the next generation to look at Nguyen Thi Oanh and think that winning means running on tears. The "superwoman" story is easy to sell. It gives the audience a warm feeling, gives sponsors a clean image, and gives the apparatus a reason not to change. But behind the medal there are other women athletes who are never named. They train in provincial towns. They pay for food and lodging out of a thin wage. They retire at 25 with no fallback career. One person's gold medal is a curtain drawn over hundreds of others. That is why I do not write about legends. I write about structures. If I could sketch the system I want, it would start with sports doctors at provincial level, with nutritionists at every meal, with injury insurance for every athlete, and with a pension fund for those who retire. That is an accounting problem. Inspiration does not pay the bill. The pitch taught me a lesson: some lessons are never rejected. So did the track. Every time I sit before a microphone and tell the story of a woman crossing the line, I remind myself not to turn her into a symbol. Symbols do not need a raise. People do. I am old, but every time I watch Nguyen Thi Oanh bend down at the start line, I feel I must keep writing. Not to celebrate. To ask. Vietnamese women's athletics has found someone to reach the finish. When will it find someone to pay the debt on that track?