Vietnamese Swimming Data: From Pool to Spreadsheet, A Journey to Find the Truth

Saigon, summer 2026. I was 23 years old, sitting in front of a computer screen with an Excel spreadsheet full of xG numbers for Hanoi FC. Two million dong of betting money had evaporated because I followed the emotional advice of a senior colleague. That was my first lesson about the difference between emotion and data. But today, I'm not writing about football. I'm writing about swimming - the sport I've been involved with since my early days as a reporter for Thanh Nien Newspaper, and also where I learned that data also needs to be watered. When I started seriously following Vietnamese swimming, I noticed something strange: we have a lot of emotion, a lot of stories about perseverance and willpower, but very little data. While world football has entered the era of statistical analysis with xG, PPDA, Vietnamese swimming is still in a period where people evaluate an athlete based on... feeling. "I feel this kid swims fast," "I feel that kid has talent." Those phrases remind me of myself in 2026, when I still believed in emotion rather than numbers. Swimming is perhaps the most measurable sport of all. There are no referee disputes, no disallowed goals, no luck. An athlete swims 100m freestyle, and the clock tells everything. But that simplicity makes us complacent. We look at results, but not at how those results were created. We look at medals, but not at the process leading to those medals. Let me tell you about a phenomenon I call the "performance illusion." An athlete can swim very fast in a domestic competition, but when competing internationally, that performance drops dramatically. People blame psychology, pressure, competition. But if we look at the data, the story could be completely different. Maybe that athlete only peaked once a year, and the domestic competition happened to fall at that time. Maybe domestic opponents aren't strong enough to create real pressure, causing the athlete to swim at an unsustainable pace. Maybe their technique has flaws that only appear when swimming at higher speeds. I remember watching a Vietnamese breaststroke swimmer compete. Her domestic results were impressive, but when I analyzed her technique through video, I saw a problem: her breathing rhythm was inconsistent, and when tired, her technique collapsed completely. Domestically, she was never pushed to that limit. But on the international stage, where 0.1 seconds can be the difference between a medal and failure, that flaw would be mercilessly exploited. That's why I always say: numbers don't lie, but they know how to hide something. In 16 years of observing the sports industry, I've witnessed too many cases of Vietnamese swimmers expected to make waves internationally, only to fail. And I've also witnessed the opposite - athletes who received little attention, but had a solid data foundation, and they exceeded expectations. The difference isn't talent, but how we evaluate that talent. Let's talk about a concept I call "sustainable speed." In swimming, sustainable speed is the speed an athlete can maintain throughout the distance without significant decline. Many Vietnamese athletes have impressive maximum speed, but poor sustainable speed. They swim the first 50m very fast, but the last 50m is significantly slower. Meanwhile, world-class athletes have very small differences between their first and last 50m. This is a metric we can absolutely measure, yet it's rarely mentioned in discussions about Vietnamese swimming. I once had the opportunity to work with a group of young athletes, and I suggested they track this metric. The results were astonishing: most athletes had an 8-12% speed decline between the first and last 50m in the 200m distance. Meanwhile, world-class athletes only decline about 4-6%. This shows the problem isn't maximum speed, but the ability to maintain speed - an issue of endurance, technique, and pacing strategy. But here's the interesting part: when I shared this finding with some coaches, they weren't interested. They said "the athlete needs to swim faster," not "the athlete needs to maintain speed better." That's a difference in mindset. One focuses on results, the other on process. And I believe this difference has created the gap between Vietnamese swimming and world swimming. I'm not saying data is everything. Swimming is still a human sport, with emotions, with willpower, with moments that can't be explained by numbers. But I believe that if we know how to use data properly, we can create better athletes, better strategies, and more sustainable success stories. Look at how top swimming nations like the US, Australia, and China operate. They don't just have talented athletes; they have massive data systems. They track every kick, every breath, every arm angle. They analyze every race, every training session, every development phase. And they use that data to make decisions - not based on feeling, but on evidence. I remember reading about how the Australian swimming team prepared for the Olympics. They had a dedicated data analysis team working with coaches to optimize every aspect of training. They didn't just measure performance; they measured many other metrics: heart rate, lactate levels, technical efficiency, sleep quality, nutrition. All that data was compiled and analyzed to create a complete picture of the athlete. And I ask myself: are we doing the same? The answer is no. And that's not the fault of coaches or athletes. It's the fault of the system. We don't have enough resources, enough technology, enough manpower to build such a data system. But we can start with the smallest things. We can start by recording every training session, every race, every metric. We can start by asking questions: why does this athlete swim faster in training but slower in competition? Why does this athlete perform well in short distances but poorly in long distances? That's why I'm writing this article. Not to criticize, not to judge, but to spark a conversation. A conversation about how we view and develop Vietnamese swimming. A conversation about how we need to change our approach, from emotional to data-driven, from intuition to evidence. Swimming is a sport of precision. Every millisecond matters. Every movement can be measured. And if we don't use those tools, we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage compared to other nations. We're depriving ourselves of the opportunity to create world-class athletes. I'm not saying this will be easy. Changing mindsets is always the hardest part. But I believe that if we start with small steps, if we start recording, measuring, analyzing, we will gradually build a solid foundation. And one day, we will have swimmers who not only win medals, but win medals sustainably, based on a solid data foundation. Football stopped moving, but 2,400 matches still whisper in my spreadsheet. And I believe Vietnamese swimming also has stories waiting to be told through data. We just need to start listening. That Saigon summer, I learned that data also needs to be watered. And today, I want to share that lesson with everyone working in Vietnamese swimming. Start recording. Start measuring. Start asking questions. And trust that the answers will come from the numbers. Emotion is the most expensive thing in the transfer market. But in swimming, emotion cannot replace data. An athlete can have an iron will, but if their technique is wrong, they will never reach the top. A coach can have years of experience, but if they don't know how to use data, they will never understand the full potential of their athletes. I want to end this article with a question: what do we want Vietnamese swimming to become in the next 10 years? An emotion-based swimming nation, with random successes and inexplicable failures? Or a data-based swimming nation, with predictable successes and analyzable failures? The answer lies within us. And I believe the right answer will come from the numbers.