National Traditional Martial Arts Championship: The Judges' Table and the Stands Score on Two Different Scales

The festival drum had barely faded when Trần Ngọc Hân, a 19-year-old fighter from the host Bình Dương delegation, pressed her palms together in salute to the judging panel and stepped three paces back off the mat. The hall clapped in triple time, so hard that I had to put my pen down before I could hear myself think. Hân's form routine ran 78 seconds. She never lost balance once, and every stance landed on the floor with the correct force.

Three minutes later, the electronic board lit up: 9.15.

The second collective gasp rolled across the stands, nothing like the first. Nobody booed. Nobody slammed a seat. It was simply a crowd that knew the sport but could not read the scoreboard, looking at each other for an explanation.

Lê Thu Trang, a fighter from the visiting delegation, had performed seven routines earlier. Her form was shorter, with two hesitations in the turning section, and she was given 9.20. Five hundredths of a point, enough to swap who advanced to the final.

I wrote in my notebook: the stands finished scoring three minutes before the judges. The stands scored with their eyes. The judges scored with their sheets. Two scales, one contest.

A 700-fighter championship with a scoreboard nobody can read

This year's national traditional martial arts championship brought together more than 700 fighters from 42 delegations, split into two categories: combat and forms-and-techniques. Forms accounted for more than 60 percent of all medal events, yet it has almost vanished from any discussion about the sport's future.

The imbalance sits in the nature of the two categories. Combat produces a visible result: who fell, who stood, who was disqualified. Forms do not. There, victory and defeat rest entirely with seven people behind a long table, and with a scale that an outsider cannot read without technical knowledge.

Bình Dương is a fitting place to see that gap. Around Thủ Dầu Một, Dĩ An and Thuận An, dozens of martial arts schools still operate, many passing the craft down three or four generations. The hall holds about 1,200 seats and was not full that day. Most of the audience were parents, students from local schools, and older men in buttoned-up shirts. No professional drum line, no big replay screen. Just an electronic board hung slightly off-centre to the left and a crackling loudspeaker.

The opening session the previous morning drew roughly 150 people. An empty arena is a silence that fans fill with faith; I wrote that line during the COVID seasons, and it still holds in a martial arts hall.

A differentiation band under 1.5 points

Scores are split into three parts: technique, up to 6; difficulty, up to 2.5; artistry, up to 1.5. It sounds detailed. But when I cross-checked the score sheets of 24 women's forms routines across two morning sessions, the picture was very different.

Technique scores never dropped below 4.8. Difficulty rarely exceeded 1.6. Artistry swung between 1.1 and 1.3. The entire real range ran from roughly 7.5 to 8.9, less than 1.5 points for more than 700 people from 42 delegations, multiple schools, multiple levels and multiple age groups.

When the band is compressed that tightly, every 0.05 becomes a wall. That wall does not measure skill, it measures how safe a routine is. And optimising for points always leads to reduced risk, while reduced risk always leads to routines that look the same.

I counted: of the 11 routines that reached the semifinals, six opened with the same stance, five used the same three-part structure, and four closed with the same salute. At a championship gathering more than 60 schools, that repetition is data, not a feeling.

Set beside it is the Vovinam approach. That discipline standardised its curriculum years ago, with a defined attacking-leg technique group, paired forms, and clear rules on scoring and margins of error, and it has featured at SEA Games 31 and SEA Games 32. Standardisation did not cost Vovinam its identity. It simply made results readable for people outside the mat.

Traditional martial arts walk a harder road: more than 60 schools, hundreds of forms, each place understanding the same strike in its own way. Hard, though, does not mean unmeasurable. What is missing is a scoring dataset published in full. To verify a result, a reporter has to request each sheet individually.

Based on my experience covering bouts on both the combat mat and the forms mat, the difference does not lie in the judges' competence. The seven people behind that table had each taught martial arts for decades; one was the head of a school. They scored exactly as the sheets instructed. The sheets are what deserve to be questioned.

The trap called preservation

The easiest explanation after every championship is bias, or favouritism towards the host delegation. I found no data supporting that. Across the two sessions I attended, Bình Dương lost at least four medals to razor-thin decisions, including Hân's routine.

The more important point sits elsewhere. For years, every proposal to revise forms scoring has been blocked by a familiar argument: standardisation means losing your roots. But the roots of a form live in the techniques, in the breathing, in the way the craft is handed down. They do not live in the number of digits after the decimal point on an electronic board.

The irony is that this very argument is eroding the sport's appeal. A martial art that wants to survive needs young people to take it up, and young people take it up when they see their effort recognised transparently. When a 19-year-old trains for eight years, steps onto the mat, does everything right, and receives a number nobody can explain, what she learns is not technique. She learns that effort is a variable she cannot control.

The crowd that day was not asking for extra points for Hân. They were asking to see the reason. Fans do not need me to give them a voice; they need me to stand on the side of that voice.

The next signal

In a few months, the sport's technical council will meet to review the scoring regulations. I will be watching three things: whether the scoreboard is shown live on a big screen, whether a breakdown of component scores appears after each routine, and whether the youth division gets its own scale. With all three, this martial art will have a data layer thick enough to argue with numbers instead of feelings.

The drum on any stand beats to the same rhythm: love of the game. What remains is making sure that drumbeat carries all the way to the people who never sit in the front row.