On Vietnam's Traditional Martial Arts Mat: When the Score Lives in the Judge's Eye

Late on an August morning in Da Nang, the arena was packed but silent as a held breath. Nguyen Thanh Dat, nineteen years old, from Quang Ngai, stepped onto the mat, bowed to the judging panel, drew one long breath, and opened with Lao Ho Thuong Son. Two minutes. Not a cough, not a chair scraping. At the final movement he straightened, brought his hands to his chest, and only then did the hall allow itself to breathe.

The scoreboard flashed: 8.75 – 8.90 – 8.85 – 9.10 – 8.80. Highest and lowest struck out, average 8.83.

The man beside me, a seventy-one-year-old martial arts master who had brought students to four editions of the festival, muttered: "That boy was steadier than the ones who scored 9.2 yesterday." I asked why. He shrugged. "Because the judges have no scale to measure difficulty."

That sentence followed me through the rest of the day.

The National Traditional Martial Arts Festival is the recurring stage of Vietnam's martial arts world, drawing dozens of delegations from provinces, cities and schools across three categories: solo fist forms, solo weapon forms and paired combat. Traditional martial arts of Binh Dinh province were added to the national intangible cultural heritage list by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2026. Vovinam, the modern Vietnamese branch systematised in the 1930s, has appeared at SEA Games. Names such as Tu Mon Quyen, Ngoc Tran Than Cong, Sieu Xung Thien and Lao Ho Thuong Son are still called out at every edition.

In the women's fist-form category, Tran Thi My Linh was seen as the strongest contender. In the men's weapon-form category, Le Hoang Phuc was the name most discussed before the first bout.

One technical detail passes most spectators by. Judges score on a ten-point scale divided into technical accuracy, aesthetics, fighting spirit, traditional character and prescribed timing. No criterion attaches a concrete value to any single movement. A spinning kick of three hundred and sixty degrees and a straight advancing punch are treated as roughly equal units, distinguished only by the feeling of the person in the judge's chair.

The edition I watched drew more than seventy delegations, most of them young athletes. That is welcome news. Yet it is precisely among the young that the gap between the top score and the low score is thinnest.

In more than forty years in the stands, from wooden floors in Binh Dinh to sealed, air-conditioned halls, I have drawn one conclusion: spectators come to see beauty, while athletes step onto the mat to be scored. Those two purposes do not always point the same way, and the distance between them is exactly where a competition system needs to be examined.

Sitting in the stands in Moscow, I learned to listen with my eyes and look with my ears. Watching a form, my ears hear the breathing; hearing a foot strike the floor, my eyes see the force. When a good athlete performs, the sound of the mat tells the story before the image does. But judges do not score with their ears. They score with a form.

The largest gap in Vietnamese traditional martial arts on the competition mat lies in its scoring system: there is no standardised difficulty coefficient for individual movements, so every technical judgement has to be converted into an aesthetic impression.

A comparison makes this clear. Artistic gymnastics separates the D-score, which measures the value of an element, from the E-score, which measures execution. Karate kata separates technical merit from athletic performance. Wushu taolu splits judges into one panel scoring the quality of difficult movements and another scoring presentation. In all of those systems, a difficult movement is recorded as difficult, whoever happens to be sitting in the chair. Vietnamese traditional martial arts folds everything into a single scale.

The consequences are not small. When difficulty carries no price, athletes are forced to choose ways of impressing the eye. Acrobatic tumbles, spinning kicks, technical falls, holding a single-leg balance longer than necessary, stretching poses for effect: all of these are rational choices in front of a panel with no measuring rod. I do not blame the athletes. I blame a system that makes them trade the precision of their forms for points.

Traditional character is a beautiful criterion on paper and almost unusable in practice. A Tu Mon Quyen passed down from generation to generation can be dismissed as old if the athlete does not add new movements, while a self-choreographed form can be praised as creative. The judges on the floor are all qualified, but none of them carries a reference standard that would show how far a form has been diluted.

At one session I recorded the average scores of the top ten athletes in a men's fist-form category. The gap between first and tenth was under half a point. Within the same panel, in the same session, the spread between individual judges rarely exceeded three tenths. High agreement sounds healthy, but in a discipline with hundreds of technical variations it suggests the opposite: judges are scoring inside a safe zone rather than against a difficulty scale. When everyone sits in a narrow band, a little goodwill or a familiar face is enough to rearrange the podium.

Then there is the question of who judges. In many categories, the scorers are masters who are still coaching athletes in the same competition. Striking out the highest and lowest scores reduces distortion but does not address the root. When every member of a panel has a student on the mat, every decision to raise one score and lower another has to be weighed, and that pressure is invisible but real.

I still think of a master in Binh Dinh who has taught for more than thirty years and told me he no longer wants to enter his students. His reason had nothing to do with winning or losing, and everything to do with the extra movements his students must drill, movements he considers far removed from the original forms, purely to earn points. "I teach martial arts," he said. "I do not teach performance."

That is a greater loss than any medal. A martial tradition loses its best teachers when the competition system no longer reflects their professional worth.

Outsiders often say competitive traditional martial arts looks more like dance than fighting. That reading lands in the wrong place. The problem is not the nature of the forms, but a scoring system that forces forms to perform in order to survive on the mat. Athletes do not naturally love to tumble. They do it because it is the shortest route to being noticed by a panel.

Another blind spot sits on the martial arts community's own side. We take pride in the 2026 recognition of Binh Dinh traditional martial arts as national intangible cultural heritage, but a title does not automatically produce a scoring standard, nor does it train a generation of young referees. Heritage that wants to live needs someone to score it fairly. Otherwise it survives only in the file.

There is one more paradox, and it may be the hardest to shift: many people in the martial arts world believe that keeping everything unchanged is the best form of preservation. But a scoring system left untouched for decades, while training methods and audience habits have changed completely, is quietly removing itself from the game. Preserving a beauty that no one can measure ends with only insiders understanding one another.

The work required is not far-fetched. A difficulty coefficient for core movements, built by the schools themselves, together with a panel of judges with no students in the draw and a training programme for young referees, could begin at the next edition. If difficulty carries a price, the best athlete wins on technique, and the youngest students learn that the beauty of martial arts lies in precision, not in applause.

Some forms last less than two minutes, but the story lingers for decades. I have seen strangers embrace in Moscow and understood that martial arts is a language needing no interpreter. Every drumbeat from the stands is a heartbeat of the city where the mat is unrolled. What remains to be answered is whether we are listening to that heartbeat in the right way.