After the Anh Vien Era: Vietnamese Swimming Between Two Currents

I stood by the pool in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City at 5 AM, watching a 14-year-old boy dive off the starting block. His dive was not perfect — the entry angle was too shallow, creating a trail of bubbles about 3 meters long before his body began to glide. In Japan, where I have lived and worked for 10 years, such a mistake would have the coach blowing the whistle immediately, making him start over. But here, there was no whistle. Only the sound of water splashing and the steady breathing of a boy trying to complete 10 laps of freestyle before sunrise. A 5 AM swim practice has 47 details, if you are still enough to see them. And I stood there, still enough, to see them all. This is not a story about technique. This is the story of a swimming nation trying to find its way after its greatest hero — Nguyen Thi Anh Vien — left the pool. And it is also the story of the first wall touches of a new generation, people swimming between two currents: one is the legacy of the past, the other is the unanswered questions about the future. Anh Vien retired in 2026, leaving a void not just in results but in symbolism. For 10 years, she was the center of every Vietnamese swimming story: 25 SEA Games gold medals, 3 SEA Games records, 2 Olympic appearances. But when she left, the entire Vietnamese swimming system was like a ship without a helmsman. The next generation — Nguyen Huy Hoang (born 2026), Tran Hung Nguyen (born 2026), Pham Thi Thu Trang (born 2026) — began making their mark at SEA Games 31 (2026) and 32 (2026). Huy Hoang won the 1500m freestyle gold, Hung Nguyen won the 400m individual medley gold. But these medals, when weighed against Asian standards, remain worryingly light. At SEA Games 32 in Cambodia, Vietnamese swimming won 10 gold medals — an impressive number on the medal table, but when compared to the results at ASIAD 2026 (no medals at all), the picture becomes clear: we are the best among the weak, and the weakest among the strong. I remember an evening in May 2026, sitting in the commentary booth at SEA Games 32 in Phnom Penh. When Huy Hoang touched the wall in the 1500m freestyle with a time of 15 minutes 12.34 seconds, I screamed along with my colleagues. But after the broadcast ended, I opened the ASIAD 2026 results and realized that Huy Hoang's time would have only ranked 6th at that ASIAD. The gap to the leader — Sun Yang with 14 minutes 31.02 seconds — was 41 seconds. In swimming, 41 seconds in the 1500m is an abyss, equivalent to a marathon runner finishing 10 minutes behind the world record. Let's look at the data. At SEA Games 32, Huy Hoang won the 1500m freestyle gold with a time of 15 minutes 12.34 seconds. This time ranked 4th at ASIAD 2026, 41 seconds behind Sun Yang's Asian record of 14 minutes 31.02 seconds. In swimming, 41 seconds in the 1500m is an abyss — equivalent to a marathon runner finishing 10 minutes behind the world record. But the more concerning numbers are not in the results, but in the technical structure. I spent 3 months reviewing all the footage of Vietnamese swimmers at SEA Games 32, and I noticed a repeating pattern: most Vietnamese swimmers have a higher stroke rate than the average of Japanese swimmers in the same age group, but a significantly lower distance per stroke. Specifically: Huy Hoang maintains an average stroke rate of 42 strokes per minute in the 1500m, while Japanese swimmers in the same event typically maintain 36-38 strokes per minute. This means Huy Hoang is expending more energy per meter traveled. If he could increase his distance per stroke from 1.8 meters to 2.1 meters — a completely feasible number for his 1m80 frame — he could save about 12% of his energy, equivalent to improving his time by 15-20 seconds in the 1500m. This is not a theoretical exercise. This is what Japanese coaches have been doing with their athletes for 20 years. The Japanese swimming system does not look for swimmers who can swim the fastest in a single practice; they look for swimmers who can swim the most efficiently in a long race. This difference lies in training philosophy, not talent. I remember an afternoon in July 2026, sitting in the commentary booth at the Hangzhou ASIAD, watching Japanese swimmer Tomoru Honda win the 400m individual medley gold with a time of 4 minutes 08.98 seconds. After the race, I reviewed his stroke data: 38 strokes per minute, 2.3 meters per stroke, 12.5 meters of underwater distance after the start. These numbers did not appear randomly. They are the result of 8 years of systematic training, starting when Honda was just 12 years old. In Vietnam, I witnessed a different reality. At the District 7 pool, the 14-year-old boy I mentioned at the beginning of this article — his name is Minh — swam 10 laps of freestyle with a technique I call "swimming by emotion": fast stroke rate, head slightly too high, hips sinking about 5 cm below the water surface. These flaws are not because he is lazy or lacks talent. They are the result of no one showing him that, in swimming, the smoothness of the body on the water matters more than the strength of the arms. I have been following Vietnamese swimming since 2026, when I was a young reporter for Thanh Nien newspaper. Back then, I wrote about swimmers as silent heroes — training in old pools, with coaches who taught themselves through books and videos. 12 years later, I returned and saw... still the same old pools, still the same self-taught coaches. A few new pools, a few modern devices, but the training structure is almost unchanged. Compare this with Japan. Here, every swimmer from junior high school has a personal "technical profile" — recording stroke rate, distance per stroke, entry angle, underwater time after the start, and dozens of other metrics. This profile is updated after every practice and used to adjust technique according to each stage of the athlete's development. In Vietnam, I rarely see a swimmer with such a profile. They swim by feel, by word-of-mouth experience, and by what the coach sees with the naked eye. This does not mean Vietnamese coaches are incompetent. Many of them are dedicated and knowledgeable. But they work in a system that does not provide them with the necessary tools. A swimming coach in Japan can use underwater cameras, motion analysis software, and data from sensors worn on the athlete. A coach in Vietnam may only have a stopwatch and their eyes. I am not saying that lack of equipment is the main reason Vietnamese swimming lags behind. I am saying that the lack of a systematic training philosophy — one that treats technique as the foundation, data as a tool, and long-term development as the goal — is the core problem. Look at Tran Hung Nguyen, the 400m individual medley swimmer. At SEA Games 32, he won gold with a time of 4 minutes 20.12 seconds. This time is 14 seconds behind Kosuke Hagino's Asian record of 4 minutes 06.05 seconds. In the medley, 14 seconds is a huge gap — equivalent to a 400m runner finishing 3 seconds behind the world record. But what is notable is not the gap, but how Hung Nguyen distributed his effort across the 4 strokes: butterfly 1 minute 02 seconds, backstroke 1 minute 05 seconds, breaststroke 1 minute 12 seconds, freestyle 1 minute 01 seconds. His breaststroke was 10 seconds slower than his freestyle — too large a discrepancy, indicating his breaststroke technique has many issues. In Japan, a 400m medley swimmer would be trained to reduce the gap between breaststroke and freestyle to 5-6 seconds. This requires years of focus on breaststroke technique — from kick angle, to head position, to breathing rhythm. Hung Nguyen has the potential to do this, but he needs a training system that can show him exactly what needs fixing. I do not measure a swimmer's speed with a stopwatch; I measure it by the distance between them and the wall touch of their opponents. And when I look at Hung Nguyen, I see a very large gap — not because he lacks talent, but because he has not been equipped with the tools to close that gap. I remember the first time I interviewed Anh Vien in 2026, at the National Sports Training Center in Da Nang. She was 19, just back from a training camp in the US, and she said something I will never forget: "I don't swim to beat others, I swim to beat myself." At the time, I thought it was a cliché. But later, when I reviewed footage of her training sessions, I understood: Anh Vien never compared herself to the opponent in the next lane. She compared herself to the clock, to the numbers, to the person she was yesterday. That is a philosophy that her successors — Huy Hoang, Hung Nguyen, Thu Trang — have not been taught. Pham Thi Thu Trang, 22, is one of the most promising female swimmers in Vietnam. At SEA Games 32, she won the 200m freestyle gold with a time of 2 minutes 01.45 seconds. This time is 7 seconds behind Li Bingjie's Asian record of 1 minute 54.37 seconds. In women's swimming, 7 seconds in the 200m is a very large gap — equivalent to a 200m runner finishing 1.5 seconds behind the world record. But what is notable is that Thu Trang only began focusing full-time on swimming in 2026, after switching from breaststroke to freestyle. She has potential, but she needs time — and a training system that can help her develop in the right direction. Now, I want to offer a perspective that may upset many people: the biggest problem of Vietnamese swimming is not the lack of pools, nor the lack of funding. The biggest problem is that we are training to win SEA Games medals, when we should be training to swim with proper technique. SEA Games is a trap. When the only goal is to beat regional opponents — who are facing similar problems — we never have to confront the real gap between us and continental standards. A swimmer who does 1500m in 15 minutes 12 seconds can win a SEA Games gold, but will be left 200 meters behind at the ASIAD finish line. And when that happens, we cannot blame the athlete. We must look at the system that produced them. I witnessed this in Japan. When Japanese swimming went through a crisis after the London 2026 Olympics — no gold medals — they did not blame the athletes. They brought in experts from the US and Australia, reviewed the entire training system, and began rebuilding from the foundations. The result: at Tokyo 2026, they won 2 golds, 1 silver, 1 bronze — a remarkable comeback. Vietnam does not need to wait for a major failure to start changing. But if we continue to celebrate SEA Games gold medals as if they were the final destination, we will forever swim in shallow water. I left the District 7 pool as the sun rose higher. Minh was still in the water, swimming 5 more laps before climbing out. He does not know that his dive has a small technical flaw, and he does not know that the flaw could be fixed in 2 weeks if a qualified coach were standing by the pool. But he knows one thing: he wants to become a swimmer. And that, perhaps, is the most valuable asset Vietnamese swimming has. A wall touch is not a stopping point, but the starting point of a different story. The question is not whether we have enough talent. The question is whether we have enough courage to look at the real gap between us and the world, and start swimming toward it — even knowing the finish line is still very far away. Because in swimming, as in life, the winner is not the one who swims the fastest, but the one who dares to swim the farthest.