A Harsh Asian Arena: Badminton Medals Are Won in the Smallest Tournaments

Hanoi, October 2026

At five in the morning the training hall opens before the factory whistle. A young player stands in the corner of the court, hitting the same high clear over and over; the coach sits on a wooden chair, a blue-covered notebook in his hand, recording every rally. At the end of the session he turns back to the first page and reads it out: fourteen official matches in twelve months.

Outsiders usually nod at this — fourteen matches is a lot. Those inside the game stay quiet. To go the full distance at an Asian championship, a player needs four times that number in the same span, so that losing points in rallies nobody records in the scoresheet becomes familiar.

At this season's opening team meeting, one sentence was repeated more than any other: the Asian arena is very harsh, a medal is not easy to win. The person who said it has been to three continental Games; each time she came home with a notebook listing the points she had conceded. Nobody on the coaching staff disagreed. The hard part comes after everyone nods: what do we do next.

I have mispronounced a player's name three times in my own newspaper, and from that I learned respect begins with calling people by their right names, and only then with writing down what they actually said. Three thousand two hundred kilometres of train journeys, two hundred and fourteen conversations with people inside the team, and the answer I heard most often was two words: not enough matches.

The team's conditions, compressed into a single session, look like this: the hall is shared in shifts with the basketball team, three shuttlecocks per session, broken rackets are patched, twelve players to one coach, and nobody is responsible for recovery after training. Equipment has to be imported under plan, and this year we get as many shuttlecocks as the plan says.

This is usually compared with our neighbours in the region and summed up neatly: they are better because they have money. That conclusion is half right. The other half matters more.

The bottleneck for Vietnamese badminton lies in the domestic tournament calendar; foreign experts and equipment are only the tip.

In Thailand, Indonesia or Malaysia, an eighteen-year-old can play sixty to eighty official matches a year without ever leaving the country. Club events, provincial events, national championships, inter-centre friendlies — all of them count, all of them carry weight, all of them force players onto court in their best condition. Our player, over the same period, has fourteen.

The gap lies in the number of decisions made under fatigue, not in the number of training sessions.

The third game of a badminton match belongs to the legs. The stroke from the back of the court is still technically correct, but the footwork back into position is half a beat late, and half a beat is enough for the shuttle to drop in front of the racket. A player who trains a lot but competes little will look elegant in practice and shaky-handed in the fourth match of a tournament. A player who competes a lot knows which shot to give up, where to conserve energy, when to change the rhythm. None of that can be taught in words, only in matches.

There is a further layer rarely discussed: reading the opponent. To read an unfamiliar player, you must have already met enough kinds of players. Fourteen matches a year means our player faces fewer than ten different opponents annually. With so few samples, tactical reflexes form slowly, and at a major event she has to think instead of react — thinking while tired is the quickest way to lose.

The coach is trapped in the same loop. A good teacher needs data from real matches in order to correct: where points are lost, why, which drill fixes it. Fourteen matches are fourteen samples, not enough to conclude anything, still less to convince a player that her mistakes are systematic. So the talk of hiring a foreign expert sounds grand, but placed in these circumstances he would sit and watch fourteen matches a year with not much to do.

No one managing recovery, no nutrition, no calendar dense enough to sharpen anyone — those three gaps add up to a larger one: no environment.

The easiest thing to say right now is to ask for more funding, invite many experts, buy much equipment. All of it is worth doing, but it is being placed in the wrong order. The right order begins with something that costs almost nothing: changing how domestic tournaments are counted.

We count medals and ignore match counts. A provincial event, a friendly between two training centres, is currently classed as a mass movement, does not count towards performance, and nobody is obliged to attend. If those events counted, were scheduled regularly and were treated as part of the training process, the calendar would thicken without a single extra dong of budget.

Late last year I went to a mass-movement tournament in an outlying province. No banners, no loudspeakers, just an old hall and three hundred people filling the stands. It was cold that day, and they still stayed to the last match. Applause from behind the stands never lies: the audience was ready, only the calendar was not.

If next year the player in that blue notebook plays thirty official matches instead of fourteen, we will not have an Asian medal straight away. But we will have what comes before a medal: a player who knows why she loses, and a coach who knows what to fix. The stands are a silent teacher; I am only a pupil who knows how to bow. That teacher has waited long enough, and the only thing left open is how long we intend to keep them waiting.