Nguyen Thi Oanh and 25 Laps: When a Medal Comes From Pacing, Not Willpower

Twenty-five laps around a 400-metre track. That number rarely makes it into the news ticker, yet it holds the entire story of the women's 10,000 metres. At 19:25, when the starting gun fired, Nguyen Thi Oanh and Le Thi Tuyet stepped into a race whose outcome would not be decided in the first lap, nor in the last, but in how they divided those twenty-five laps into a rhythm they could sustain to the end. An hour and a half earlier, at 17:44, a different contest had unfolded on the approach runway: the women's triple jump final, with Vu Thi Ngoc Ha and Nguyen Thi Huong. Two events, two almost opposite physical natures, sharing a single session of Vietnamese athletics at the Asian Games. And both told the viewer the same thing: the human limit is not a wall standing still, it is a curve that needs to be read in the right place. The backdrop that evening was anything but comfortable. Asian middle and long-distance athletics has long been shaped by two powers, Japan and China, alongside a wave of naturalised athletes of African origin wearing the colours of Gulf and East Asian nations. It is a harsh ecosystem, where the gap in training infrastructure, recovery nutrition and the number of high-quality races per year cannot be bridged by a few months of concentrated work. All eyes turned to Nguyen Thi Oanh. Domestic media call her the "golden girl", a beautiful title that is also a burden. At successive Southeast Asian Games, Oanh proved she could run multiple events on the same day, from the 3,000m steeplechase to the 5,000m and 10,000m. That kind of multi-event athlete is rare, and the price is always compressed recovery time. Beside Oanh stood Le Thi Tuyet, a young runner. In Tuyet, one sees a different picture: less expectation, but also less pressure. Her presence in a continental final is worth far more than a supporting role on a news page. At the same time, out at the jumping area, Vu Thi Ngoc Ha and Nguyen Thi Huong faced a completely different kind of test: not endurance, but explosion compressed into a few seconds. The 10,000 metres on a stadium track follows a very clear mechanical law. Runners must average roughly 5.5 to 6.2 metres per second to contend for a medal, depending on conditions. The problem is that misjudging speed slightly at lap ten turns the final two laps into torture. Running fast early to claim a good position burns stored muscle glycogen, and once that runs out the body must switch to burning fat, a far slower and less efficient process. That is why pacing, not stubbornness, decides most of a distance race. A negative-split approach, meaning each lap faster than the last, demands extraordinary discipline in the first half, when the body is full of energy and instinct urges the runner to surge. That instinct always deceives us. There is a factor viewers rarely notice: drafting. Running in a group, the athlete behind spends roughly three to five percent less energy than the leader at the same speed. Over a 10,000 metres, saving a few percent of energy is the same as keeping one final kick in reserve. Choosing to sit behind a rival or to move to the front out of a sense of control is a pure tactical question, not a question of courage. Notably, in long-distance events, the closing kick lasts only the final four hundred to eight hundred metres. In that window, runners push their speed some twenty percent above their average rhythm. To do so, they must have preserved that energy across the first twenty laps, meaning they had to restrain themselves for nearly four fifths of the race. This is where I often object to how the media describes such races. Reports tend to say the result was built on "resilient willpower" and "reasonable tactics". Willpower cannot split a lap, while tactics is precisely the allocation of pace. The two words get mixed up so often that readers are left thinking a runner simply needs more determination to break away from a field with a deeper training base. I do not sell predictions; I sell hypotheses. There is an ocean between the two. The hypothesis here is this: if Nguyen Thi Oanh holds an even rhythm across the middle six laps, the rest of the race becomes hers to decide with a short closing surge. If that rhythm breaks before lap fifteen, everything afterwards is merely consequence. Over on the runway, the nature of the challenge is entirely reversed. The women's triple jump is not a story of twenty-five laps but of barely nine seconds. In those nine seconds, the athlete must sprint some thirty-five to forty-five metres down the approach, reaching nearly nine to ten metres per second just before the board, then execute three consecutive phases: the hop, the step and the jump into the sand. The ratio between those three phases decides most of the result, and no two athletes distribute them identically. The hop usually covers about thirty-five to thirty-seven percent of the distance, the step about twenty-eight to thirty percent, and the final jump about thirty-three to thirty-five percent. If the step is too long, the athlete loses momentum and the jump collapses. If the step is too short, energy is wasted from the start. That is why triple-jump technique is considered among the hardest to correct. Unlike speed, which tends to improve relatively linearly through training, the three-phase ratio is a movement pattern that needs thousands of repetitions to stabilise. Vu Thi Ngoc Ha and Nguyen Thi Huong entered the final with the task of holding that ratio across six attempts, under the pressure of a continental stage. Every tactical blueprint is an orderly lie; I go looking for the truth behind it. In the distance race, that blueprint is a pace chart that looks neat on paper. On the runway, it is the golden three-phase ratio. In reality, both are broken by wind, humidity, the surface, and the rival standing beside you. What the two events actually share lies elsewhere: both are sports of slowing down to see true speed. In distance running, the winner is often the one who runs slowest through the middle. In the triple jump, the winner is often the one who runs the first thirty metres of the approach most calmly. This is where I want to offer a contrarian angle against how domestic coverage is framing the story. Media attention is poured entirely into the women's 10,000 metres, where the chance of a gold medal is conceded by the original report itself as "extremely difficult". Meanwhile, the jumping area, with two athletes present, is a place where the gap between Vietnam and the continental leaders may be marginally narrower, at least in theory. Media attention follows the name, not the probability. An athlete who already carries the "golden girl" nickname will always attract more cameras than a jumper who has never appeared on a front page. That is a law of media, not a law of sport. And it frequently leads fans to misjudge where the real opportunity lies. In the 10,000 metres, the gap between the leading Asian group and the rest of the continent is an infrastructure chasm. Strong teams run data-driven load monitoring, operate on-site lactate testing labs, and keep a year-round international race calendar to accumulate racing experience. None of that can be bought with a short training camp. Arena Ghosts was not cancelled; it is only waiting for a season brave enough to tell it. The story of Vietnamese athletes quietly running hundreds of laps a week at training centres with no spectators is exactly the kind of forgotten sports story that deserves reviving. It shows the submerged part of the iceberg, the part every report on a final session barely reveals in a few lines. Looking back at the whole session, what struck me was not the result but the way two contrasting events coexisted within one time frame. One demands patience distributed across twenty-five laps, the other demands an explosion compressed into nine seconds. Both force people to confront their own limits, only in two different languages. For Nguyen Thi Oanh, the question is not whether she has enough determination. The question is whether the coaching staff can build a pace plan precise enough that she does not waste her closing kick in the middle section. That requires data, not just belief. It requires measuring every four-hundred-metre segment in training, comparing it against real competition conditions, and adjusting before stepping onto the start line. For Le Thi Tuyet, the value lies elsewhere. A young runner reaching a continental final is accumulating something no training centre can simulate: the feeling of standing among a world-class field and forcing her body to adapt to their speed. That experience will follow her into every race to come. For Vu Thi Ngoc Ha and Nguyen Thi Huong, the measure of success may not be placing but holding a stable three-phase ratio across multiple attempts. A technically correct jump that falls short beats a longer jump born of luck but off-axis. On the runway, consistency is an accumulating asset. There is one thing reports often skip when covering finals like this. The gap between the first and last finisher in a continental distance race can reach several minutes. But the gap between fourth and eighth place is often just a few seconds. It is in those few seconds that the real coaching work happens, where each lap is improved by a tenth of a second. I spent years making sports documentaries, recording the sound of stadiums with no crowds, listening to footsteps on the track and the heavy breathing of people alone with themselves. What I learned from that is that an athlete's most important moment is almost never broadcast. It happens in a five a.m. training session, when no one is counting the laps. Back on the 10,000 metres track, what I want readers to take away is not a prediction about medals. I am not in a position to make such a promise, and the original report itself already admits the chance is extremely difficult. What I want to place on the table is a testable hypothesis: in elite distance racing, the deciding factor is not the level of determination but the precision of the energy-allocation equation. If that hypothesis holds, then the way we tell the story of Vietnamese athletes needs to change too. Instead of waiting for a miracle, we could track their pace across each four-hundred-metre segment, compare it with previous races, and recognise progress even before a medal arrives. That telling is drier, but more honest, and it may hold fans' trust for longer. There is one image I keep from that evening's session. When every event had closed and the stadium lights were still on, the track still bore the imprint of footsteps that had just passed. Twenty-five laps were over, but lap twenty-six, belonging to tomorrow's training, would begin before the sky had time to brighten. Sport, after all, remains a common language in which people measure themselves anew each day, in a unit smaller than a second.