Vietnamese Swimming After Anh Vien: The Silence Between Two Breaths

A swimming pool without stands still knows how to cheer. I tell myself that every time I sit alone at the National Sports Training Center, when the sound of breaking water is the only thing left after every race has ended. A five a.m. training session. Yellow bulbs on the water's surface. No scoreboard, no cheering, just a lane being torn open by hands repeatedly practicing one entry technique, as if the whole of Vietnamese swimming were trying to breathe properly after a long period of holding its breath.

The person in lane four that day was not Nguyen Thi Anh Vien. She was seventeen, her hair still wet, her eyes fixed on the black line at the bottom of the pool. I stood on deck, notebook open, and suddenly realized I was waiting for something that no longer existed. Anh Vien had left the racing lane. But Vietnamese swimming had not yet learned how to leave her shadow.

That was the moment I understood what I wanted to write. Not a memorial. Not a celebration of the past. Something harder: after the hero leaves, what is left — a system, or just a void patched over with hope?

Context: when one star carries the whole sky

Nguyen Thi Anh Vien was never just an athlete. For more than a decade she was the entire face of Vietnamese swimming on the international stage. From a girl in Can Tho discovered through a talent search, she stepped onto the SEA Games podium at fifteen and from then on almost single-handedly carried the expectations of an entire sport. The numbers speak for her: dozens of SEA Games gold medals, Olympic and World Championship finals, national records broken again and again by the same person.

I was present at many competitions where Anh Vien competed. What I remember is not the results. I remember the silence before she stepped onto the starting block. She would stand there, eyes closed, both hands pressed to her hips, taking a long breath as if trying to load an entire pool of water into her lungs. Then the whistle. Then the water. And behind the water, an entire country holding its breath.

That is a burden few outsiders understand. When you are the only one, every failure you have is a failure of the whole sport. When you are the only one, you have no teammates to lean on, no one to share the pressure, no one standing between you and the storm of expectation. You swim alone in a lane the whole nation is watching.

In 2026, Anh Vien announced her retirement at twenty-five. I was not surprised. I had seen the signs — persistent injuries, tired eyes after sessions, and above all the sense that she had given more than a single human being can give. An athlete cannot keep swimming forever in the one lane everyone watches from the shore.

But if Anh Vien's retirement were merely a personal event, it would not be worth our attention. What makes it a problem for the whole sport is this: when she left, people suddenly realized there was no one behind her. No successor class deep enough to fill the void. No system strong enough to keep producing people like her.

In a mature sporting nation, a star's retirement is routine. The successor is already waiting. The coaching staff is prepared. The data has accumulated. Here, we have silence. And that silence, if I read it correctly, is not the calm before a storm. It is the ragged breath of a system that was not ready for tomorrow.

Analysis: the skeleton of an absence

Nguyen Huy Hoang is the first name people mention when they talk about the future. This young man from Quang Binh is genuinely talented. A continental bronze medal, an Olympic berth, national records in distance freestyle — these are not the results of a mediocre competitor. But I want you to notice something else. When Huy Hoang competes, people once again place on his shoulders the very burden Anh Vien once carried. Once again "the hope of Vietnamese swimming." Once again one person, one lane.

That is the fault of the system, not of the athlete.

Look at how we build our squads. For years Vietnamese swimming has operated on what I call the "lighthouse model." We have very bright lighthouses — Anh Vien, Huy Hoang — but around them is darkness. There is no lit coastline. There are only a few isolated lamps, and when one goes out, that stretch of coast falls silent.

Compared with athletics, the sport I have followed for many years, the gap becomes clearer. Vietnamese athletics also once lived off outstanding individuals — Nguyen Thi Huyen in the hurdles, Nguyen Van Lai in the steeplechase, Bui Thi Thu Thao in the long jump. But the difference is that in athletics, the generations partly overlap. When one class leaves, another has already grown. There is a current, weak but continuous.

In swimming, that current is far thinner. And the reason lies in the structure of the sport.

First, swimming is a sport of infrastructure. You cannot become an elite track athlete only by running the streets, but at least you can run. Swimming is different. Without a standard pool, without water, without an internationally compliant filtration system, you can do nothing. A country that wants a strong swimming program needs hundreds of pools across its provinces, a school system that teaches children to swim early, and a thick layer of grassroots coaches. In Vietnam we have pools, but they are concentrated in major cities and often tied to commercial ends rather than development.

Second, swimming is a long-horizon sport. An elite swimmer needs eight to twelve years to mature, depending on the event. That means any investment requires a patience that high-performance sport rarely has. We want medals now. We want results within a four-year cycle. But swimming does not run on the rhythm of an Olympic cycle. It runs on the rhythm of a human life.

Third, swimming is a sport of exquisitely fine technique. I have spent years watching swim races and I can say this: in swimming, technique is not a side part. It is the main part. An entry off by a few degrees, a breath mistimed, an arm pull off its axis — together these become one or two seconds over a hundred meters. And fixing a bad technical habit can take years.

This leads me to another observation, and it may be the hardest to hear. We lack a layer of highly specialized coaches. Not a shortage of people who can swim. A shortage of people who can watch a stroke and instantly point out: this wrist is slack, this hip is sinking, this head is lifting too high. In elite swimming, the coach is an expert in kinesiology, physiology, psychology. It is a profession that requires years of training and a living wage.

I often think about a morning at the national pool. A group of children training. The coach on deck, talking without pause, whistle in hand. The kids swim from one end to the other, turn, swim again. No one stops to analyze a flawed movement. No one has time. With thirty children in a two-hour session, how can you correct each one? What I call "swimming of quantity" is missing "swimming of quality."

And here is the crux: Vietnamese swimming needs a grassroots revolution, not a hunt for the next star. We do not lack an eye for talent. We lack the hands to shape it.

Deep analysis: lessons from memorable lanes

I want to tell a story I have followed for years, not directly about Vietnam but speaking volumes.

Karsten Warholm broke the 400m hurdles world record in Tokyo in 2026 with 45.94 seconds, shattering a 46.70 mark that had stood for nearly thirty years. It was one of the greatest sporting moments I have witnessed in person. But what I want to talk about is not the moment. It is what came before.

Warholm spent years studying 400m hurdles technique. He and his team changed their stride count between hurdles, adjusted rhythm, focused on holding speed over the final stretch — where most athletes collapse. They did not try to run faster through willpower. They tried to run faster through technique and data. Every session was recorded, analyzed, adjusted. That is the labor of a system, not of an individual. Warholm is the name on the record board, but the science behind him is what made history.

I tell this story because I believe it applies directly to Vietnamese swimming. We are asking the wrong question. We ask: "Who will be the next Anh Vien?" When the right question should be: "How do we have ten Anh Viens at once?" And that question cannot be answered by searching. It can only be answered by building.

I have an odd habit when reporting: I count. I count how many times an athlete breathes in a lap. I count strides between hurdles. I count how many times a coach speaks to a pupil in ten minutes. Those small numbers, added up, tell me a bigger story than any results board.

At Vietnamese swimming training centers, I often see a familiar pattern: high volume, high intensity, low precision. The children swim many meters. They also train very hard. But the proportion of time devoted to perfecting specific technique, to video analysis, to working with motion data, is surprisingly low. It is a strategy that elite sport today has begun to doubt.

Why? Because swimming has changed. The revolution of high-tech swimsuits, peaking around 2026 to 2026, forced the world back to a basic question: what actually creates speed? Today's answer is a combination of three things: perfect technique, individualized fitness, and decision-making within the race. There is no room for luck. And no room for merely training hard.

First, perfect technique. In short-distance freestyle, people say that each slightly off entry costs about a thousandth of a second. It sounds trivial, but multiplied by every entry in a race, it becomes half a meter over a hundred meters. At the international level, half a meter is a podium or nothing.

Second, individualized fitness. No single training program suits everyone. Lactate threshold, maximum heart rate, muscle composition, recovery capacity — all differ from person to person. In leading swimming nations, each athlete has an individual program, adjusted weekly based on data. In Vietnam, the common model is still "the whole group trains the same." That means we are optimizing for the average — and the average does not win medals.

Third, decision-making within the race. This is the hardest part and the most neglected. An elite swim race is not a fitness drill. It is a tactical problem played out over minutes. When to accelerate? When to hold pace? When to change breathing rhythm? When to gamble on the final lap? Those decisions are made when the body is oxygen-deprived, the heart at two hundred beats per minute, and every sense is telling you to stop. At that level, the mind matters as much as the muscles.

And here, to me, is where Vietnamese swimming must think seriously: we have a sporting culture that teaches athletes fighting skills, but not yet tactical thinking. Between "swimming well" and "racing well" there is a great distance. And that distance can only be bridged by elite competitive experience — something only nations with strong competitive circuits can provide.

A contrarian angle: stop looking for the next hero

Here is what I want to say plainly, even if it upsets some people.

The way we pursue swimming — and many other sports — is the way of a treasure hunter. We believe that somewhere out there is a girl or boy of extraordinary talent, and if we find them, if we train them right, we will have a new star. This approach once worked. It gave us Anh Vien. But it is unreliable, and more importantly, unsustainable.

This way of thinking has a fatal flaw: it depends on luck. With a population of more than ninety million, we will always have talented individuals appear by probability. But a sport cannot run on probability. It needs a process. A country with a far smaller population than Vietnam, Hungary, has produced countless world swimming champions. Their secret is not talent. Their secret is a system in which talent is not wasted.

I think we are also misplacing our focus. We concentrate too much on bonuses and morale for elite athletes, things that affect only a very small group. Meanwhile, grassroots coaches — the people who actually create athletes and determine the quality of the whole sport — are paid poorly and lack professional development. That is an inversion of priorities. You can have the world's best athlete in a coaching-poor system, and that person will soon become ordinary. But you cannot have a strong sport in a weak coaching system.

Another contrarian point, perhaps more contentious: I believe the pressure to produce a "next star" is harming the young athletes themselves. When every new talent is hailed as "the second Anh Vien," we place on their shoulders an expectation out of proportion to their natural development. We force them to grow on the media's calendar, not their bodies'. And when they fail to meet that expectation — as will almost certainly happen for some — we turn away, treating it as a personal failure, when it is really a failure of how we view and treat youth sport.

I have seen too many such stories. A young athlete shines at a small event. The press writes about them. Then an injury. Then a slump. Then silence. The audience never learns what happened. They only know "they didn't make it." But I know. I know because I have sat in press halls, talked with coaches in corridors, heard the sighs when a talent is lost. The problem is not that those kids were not good enough. The problem is that around them there was no net wide enough to catch them when they fell.

But I do not want to end on a bleak picture. Because the truth is: on those five a.m. lanes, work is still being done, quietly and persistently.

Movement and hope

Let us return to the pool in Hanoi. The seventeen-year-old girl I mentioned at the start. I watched her over many sessions. She was not remarkable in results. She had never won an international medal. But she had something many young athletes lack: patience with herself.

Once, I saw her repeat one entry movement for forty-five minutes, one time after another, slowly, carefully. Her coach said only a few short sentences. She nodded, then did it again. There was no sign of frustration or despair. Just work. Just what had to be done to make that movement a part of her body, of instinct.

That is what I want to see more of. Not the explosive moments on the medal podium, but the quiet moments before — the moments in which sport is truly made. There, in the silence of a training session, what is happening is not preparation for a medal. It is preparation for a human being.

I hold a belief, and I keep it even when reality tests it. Vietnamese swimming does not lack talent. It lacks time, structure, and our own patience — we who sit on the shore and wait. We want results now. We want a new star now. But swimming does not work that way. It works like a river. You cannot stand on the bank and shout at the water to flow faster. You can only wait, watch, and sometimes quietly adjust the current by digging new channels into it.

And here is what I think we need to do. Not find the next hero, but build the system. Not shout at the river, but open more branches. Not concentrate all resources on a few individuals, but distribute them to thousands of small facilities, where children are taught to swim not to become athletes, but to become people who know how far they can go when given the chance.

A country with more than ninety million people, with more than three thousand kilometers of coastline, with long winding rivers, ought to have a strong swimming tradition. Not because nature gave us water, but because water is a part of us. We Vietnamese are born close to water. We grow up with rivers, ferries, rainwater. What we lack is not closeness to water. What we lack is a way of seeing that turns closeness into a sport, into professional skill, and finally into medals.

What waits at the end of the lane

The stopwatch does not lie. It tells me we still have a long distance ahead. But it cannot tell me when we will arrive. The gap can close within one generation, if we start building now. Or it can stretch on endlessly, if we keep sitting and waiting for a star to fall into the pool.

I keep in my notebook a line an athlete once said to me. He said: "I'm not sure I can win a medal. But I'm sure that every day I get in the water. And that is what I can control." That is the spirit of swimming. Not the glory of a single moment, but the persistence of a thousand quiet moments added together.

For Vietnamese swimming, I hope we learn that lesson at a deeper level. I hope every province has a pool capable of elite training, every coach is paid in proportion to their work, every young athlete is given time to grow without being crushed by expectation. I hope we understand that sport is not meant to produce people who save a sport, but to create a sport that does not need saving.

When Anh Vien left the lane, she left a silence. I believe that silence is not a full stop. It is a pause between two breaths. After every long held breath, the human body must exhale. And after every exhalation, there is another inhalation to follow. The question is not whether we will swim on. The question is how we will swim when there is no longer a single hero to follow.

Night has fallen. The lights in the national pool are still on. The water is still blue. And somewhere beneath that water, a pair of hands is tearing through it again. The rhythm does not change. The breathing does not change. The journey does not change. It is only we — those standing on the shore — who need to learn to see it with new eyes.