Teqball and Karate: Vietnam's Two Bronze Medals at Asian Games 20

Three in the morning in Nha Trang, the ceiling fan turning steadily overhead, I sat in front of a small screen watching the bronze-medal match of the Teqball mixed doubles. The ball rolled across the curved table, bounced up, fell back down, and Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan cushioned it with his foot as if soothing a sleeping child. Across the net, India's Dsouza Quimcy Joaquim and Beg Mohamed Anas Imran stood taut under the arena lights. The score closed at 2-0. The whistle sounded, and Vietnam's first bronze medal at Asian Games 20 went to a sport most domestic viewers still hesitate to name.

I have sat through enough mornings like that one to know people usually remember the wrong moment. They remember the medal. I remember Minh Tan's foot before the second ball.

Teqball was born in Hungary in 2026 on a curved table, where players may only touch the ball with feet, thighs, chest and head. No hands. The curved surface means the ball's trajectory never repeats, forcing players to read rhythm instead of memorising movements. The sport entered an Asian Games programme for the first time at Asian Games 20, and that is precisely why it is both an opportunity and a trap.

The opportunity lies in the fact that continental powers have not yet invested in it. The trap lies in the fact that, for that same reason, the gap between delegations is compressed, and a medal here says little about the system behind it.

Vietnam entered the mixed doubles with Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan and Trinh Gia Nghi. I have never watched the two train together in person, but in footage from regional tournaments one detail kept me watching: the pair barely speak while the ball is moving. They move with their eyes. When one drifts wide to open an angle, the other is already in the middle lane half a beat earlier. That kind of coordination does not come from a tactics meeting. It comes from hundreds of sessions repeated to the point of boredom, where two people learn to trust each other without words.

In the bronze-medal match, the Vietnamese pair won 2-0, but the score does not tell the whole story. In the first set, the Indian players drove the ball deep toward the right corner, where Gia Nghi has to rotate most. She chose not to meet it head-on. She slowed the rhythm, lifted the ball slightly higher, just enough for Minh Tan to arrive in time. That solution was not pretty. It was merely effective. And in a sport where the curved table makes every trajectory unpredictable, effectiveness is a luxury.

In the second set, India changed approach, pushing Beg Mohamed Anas Imran higher to block overhead trajectories. Minh Tan answered with three consecutive balls drilled low against the base of the table. I counted three touches on the curved edge. All three bounced into the opponent's court. What decided the bronze medal was not peak technique, but the ability to read rhythm a quarter of a second faster than the opponent.

I counted the ball's bounces on the table like counting the breaths of a collective breathing together. The sound of the ball on wood was dry, even, unglamorous. It reminded me of mornings on the training ground, when no one yet sits in the stands and everything is still a draft.

Barely hours later, in the men's doubles, Ba Truong Giang and Le Anh Khoa lost to the Iraqi pair in the bronze-medal match on the morning of 20 September. I did not watch that match live. I only read back four lines of results. But those four lines were enough to recognise a familiar law of Vietnamese sport: when a door opens in a new sport, we rush in with enthusiasm, then let it slip at the very moment experience matters most.

On the same morning, at the Karate hall, Bui Ngoc Nhi entered the women's individual kata event. In her opening bout she faced Japan's Ono Maho and lost 0-5. For a kata athlete, that score is not necessarily a weak defeat. Ono Maho was competing at home, in front of a crowd cheering for her. Ngoc Nhi knew that before she stepped out.

The rhythm of a kata is not measured in seconds but in breath. Where the athlete exhales, where she tightens, how long she holds before the decisive strike. Judges do not score isolated movements; they score the unity of breath and motion. After losing 0-5 to Ono Maho, Ngoc Nhi stepped down, took a sip of water, and stood waiting behind the mat. There was nothing to watch there. Just a young woman standing still.

One year, I spent nearly a week sitting in the corner of a youth tournament hall just to observe athletes waiting their turn. Those who had just lost an opening bout usually fell into two types. The first sat down, buried their face in a phone, detaching themselves from the competition. The second stood still and moved their lips. Ngoc Nhi was the second type. She ran the kata again in her head, through her breath, while everyone around her was still busy feeling sorry for her.

Then she met Choi Haeun of South Korea. 5-0. Then Leong Wai Yee Shannon of Singapore. 4-1.

Two bouts, two scores, one bronze medal. Reading the results is simple. But behind those numbers lies a morning in which a female martial artist had to do two things at once: defeat the opponent in front of her and defeat the memory of the defeat just past. The second is far harder, and it does not appear on the scoreboard.

At Asian Games 20, Ngoc Nhi still has a chance of another medal. She and her teammates enter the women's team kata quarter-finals against Nepal on 22 September. That is a milestone worth watching, not because of the opponent, but because of how an athlete who has just passed through a personal shock merges her rhythm with the team's.

After nearly half a day of competition, the medal table took shape. China climbed to the top with 2 golds, 4 silvers and 1 bronze; athlete Lin Xinyu took China's first gold in the women's triathlon. Host Japan was second with 2 golds and 3 bronzes. Macao, South Korea and Kazakhstan each had 1 gold, ranking third to fifth. Vietnam's delegation stood ninth with 2 bronzes.

Looking at that table, someone in my profession has to remind himself not to rush. The standings on the first day of a continental games say little about the road ahead. But the way we win medals does.

This is where I want to speak plainly about something the domestic media mood is getting wrong. Vietnam's two bronzes that day came from two sports that are fundamentally different in nature. Teqball is a new sport, without a training system, without a large national competition, without a curriculum for children. Karate is the opposite: decades of investment, a network of dojos spread across the provinces, and generations of athletes selected from the age of twelve.

People are celebrating the medal in the new sport as a symbol of quick adaptation. But the paradox is this: it is precisely the new sports where results come most easily, and also fade most easily. When Teqball was added to the Asian Games, it opened a window. That window will close quickly, as soon as the big delegations recognise its medal value and start pouring in money. By then, without a system behind it, we will be watching from outside.

By contrast, Ngoc Nhi's kata bronze is the one worth thinking about longer. It comes from a structure that already exists, has been nourished by many generations, and is capable of producing further medals. Such a structure is less attractive to the media than a novelty sport, but it is what survives after the noise dies down.

There is another way of thinking worth putting on the table. We often call a new sport a "golden opportunity", forgetting that a golden opportunity belongs to everyone, not to us alone. India, Iraq, Singapore and Nepal all stand at the same starting line as we do. Winning there does not prove that we are stronger at the foundation. It proves only that in that moment, two specific individuals read the rhythm better than the person across from them.

And I hold to my old belief, the one that has followed me through decades of writing: the truest pulse is not in the stands, but beneath the feet of early-morning training sessions. A medal is only the echo of a process that takes place where no one is filming.

At 62, I have learned that time does not make a delegation grow old, it only makes the story thicker. Asian Games 20 has only just passed its first half day. Ahead lie events in which Vietnam is rated more highly.

In the gap between two competition sessions, I will go back and watch the women's team kata quarter-final against Nepal on 22 September. Not to watch the medals. But to watch how a female martial artist who has just passed through a personal shock stands beside her teammates — whether an individual's rhythm will merge with the collective's. If it does, we will know we are building a structure. If it does not, we are merely collecting moments.