Vietnamese Wushu Taolu: The Score Lives in the Final Breath

During a live taolu session at a SEA Games event, I sat in the fourth row, close enough to hear the athlete's breathing as she closed her final movement. The stands erupted in applause. But her eyes were not on the crowd. She turned toward the judging table, where three panels were bent over their score sheets, and I knew exactly what she was waiting for: a deduction in Group A.

People remember the soaring routine; I remember the coach's very quick squeeze of the hand when the scores appeared. Every season has its own heartbeat, if you take the trouble to listen.

Taolu is the performance discipline of wushu, and in Vietnam it usually ranks behind the combat events in the way the media sees things. The International Wushu Federation (IWUF) scoring scale divides a routine into three groups: Group A scores movement quality at 5.00 points, Group B scores overall presentation, meaning rhythm, expression and continuity, at 3.00 points, and Group C scores difficulty, or nandu, at 2.00 points.

Those three groups run like three clocks measuring different things. Group C is the loudest part, the easiest for the stands to recognise: the 360 and then 540 degree spinning jumps, balance poses that must be held for a full two seconds, falls that must be controlled and on axis. Group B is the part spectators can feel but rarely name: the tension in the back, the openness of the shoulders, the ring of the wrist at the closing movement. Group A is the part that is almost invisible from the stands, and it is also where the most points are lost. Figures such as Duong Thuy Vi and Hoang Thi Phuong Giang showed that Vietnamese athletes can reach the top tier of this discipline when all three groups are handled in balance.

Over the past few seasons I have carried a separate notebook to record the detailed scores of Vietnamese athletes after each routine. My method is simple: three columns, A, B and C, plus a margin column for each specific fault. The habit comes from a working routine that has become second nature. I write slowly because I want to remember for a long time, like the man who keeps time for the whole field.

That notebook reveals a fairly clear pattern. Vietnamese athletes usually earn good Group B scores. Their coaches teach rhythm carefully, teach how to hold facial expression and how to let the closing movement ring, the things judges call presence. Group C is not a major problem either, because the nandu catalogue is trained over a multi-year roadmap, and domestic training centres have learned how to arrange difficulty for maximum points.

The problem sits in Group A, and it sits in details so small they are hard to believe. Group A deductions do not come from a failed jump; they come from a foot that has not finished rotating, an elbow slightly off the straight line, a breath held too long until the shoulder lifts by about two centimetres. Those three faults repeat again and again in my notebook, and none of them has anything to do with how high the athlete jumps.

I once sat through an entire training session in Nha Trang to watch a young athlete fix exactly one such fault. She drilled the landing after the 540-degree spin, over and over. Once she landed beautifully, the trainees in the hall applauded, but the coach still shook his head. The reason: the toe of the front foot was about ten degrees off the required direction. Ten degrees, under IWUF scoring, is enough to lose points in Group A, and a routine that loses just half a point in Group A drops at least one place in the standings.

What is notable is that fixing those ten degrees took nearly four weeks. Four weeks for an angle the naked eye in the stands cannot detect. Meanwhile a new difficult movement can be learned in about ten days. This is the paradox specific to taolu: the hardest part to learn is not the part that takes longest to fix.

I call this the dark zone of Group A. That dark zone explains why an athlete can win at a domestic event yet fall behind on the international stage, even though the routine looks almost unchanged from outside. At domestic events there are fewer judges, and the strictness in Group A tends to be looser. On an international floor, the same routine is examined with a different ruler.

Vietnamese spectators tend to hold a persistent misunderstanding about this sport: that taolu is a performance, and whoever soars higher and looks more ornate wins. Reality on the floor runs the other way. Judges deduct for movements that are too elaborate if they break the structure of the routine. A moderate jump landed square on axis always has the edge over a higher jump that comes down off axis. The reward is not where the applause is loudest.

A second misunderstanding is worth naming: many people believe taolu is divorced from fighting value, and so deserves less respect than combat disciplines. It is Group A, the movement-quality group, that preserves the old combat principles: the axis of the body, the direction of the toe, the tension at the moment of issuing force. A routine deducted in Group A is usually a routine that, applied in a real situation, would not transmit force fully. The judges do not say so out loud, but their ruler was built from that.

In the training hall in Nha Trang, I have often heard a coach tell his students something I wrote down word for word: "Do not train for the crowd's applause; train so the judges have nothing to deduct." It sounds dry, but it is an entire training philosophy, turning a sport that looks like display into a problem of optimising invisible things.

The quiet stars of Nha Trang never go out. The taolu athletes I have followed for years are not famous, have no sponsorship contracts, and spend most of their time in the training hall, correcting angles no one will ever see. Their achievements are measured in fractions of a second and degrees of misalignment.

For me, the signal worth watching next season is not on the medal table. It lies in whether training centres will give enough time to Group A, or will keep pouring effort into raising difficulty for effect. A squad that lifts its Group C score while keeping Group A clean will go further than a squad that burns all its hours on beautiful spins. That cannot be seen from the stands, and it cannot be seen from the final score sheet either. It only appears in early-morning sessions, when a young athlete lands for the hundredth time and the coach still shakes his head, then nods.