The Blank Split Column: Where Vietnam's Athletics Races Are Decided and Nobody Records It

I still keep a results file from a national athletics meet on my laptop. The finishing-time column is full. The bib-number column is full. The personal-best column is full. Only the four columns in the middle — the 5km, 10km, 15km and 20km splits for the men's marathon — are completely blank. Not one or two rows missing. The whole column, white.

Everyone knows who won. Everyone knows who finished seventy seconds behind the winner. Everyone knows who dropped out somewhere around the thirtieth kilometre. But nobody knows how much faster the lead group ran the tenth kilometre than the twentieth, and nobody knows at exactly which kilometre the race was actually decided — in the sense that a runner left the contest without anyone in the stands noticing.

Gaps on the track are living things, and they change when someone dares to believe. But before anyone dares to believe, someone has to be willing to press a stopwatch.

Two athletics nations, two habits of record-keeping

In Kenya, where I live and write, a road race carrying a World Athletics label comes with electronic timing mats at the split points as standard, and the split sheet is published as part of the result rather than as a bonus for fans. Major races in Iten, in Eldoret, in Nairobi publish every 5km of the lead group, pacemakers included. Anyone reading the results can follow the story: where the front pack broke apart, who surged first, who held on only until the thirtieth kilometre.

In Vietnam, that is not yet the default. Major events such as the VnExpress Marathon series and the half-marathons in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City have timing mats at selected points, but most meets inside the national competition system stop at two marks: the gun and the finish line. For track events, lap splits are recorded by hand, by stopwatch, by a coach's memory.

Hand timing carries error. World Athletics is explicit: a record is only valid when the time is taken by a fully automatic electronic system, meaning a system started by the gun and confirmed by finish-line photography. Hand times cannot establish records, however small the margin of error. In the long jump and the sprints, a record must also carry a wind reading, and any wind above 2 metres per second removes an otherwise beautiful mark from the record lists.

The rule itself concedes something important: a performance without accompanying data cannot be verified. Vietnam's problem sits elsewhere. The rules are not missing. The habit of recording is.

I once sat in a technical meeting before a national meet. The organisers said plainly that they had enough people for the finish line and the turnaround point, and not enough for the split points. Nobody objected. It was an administrative decision, entirely reasonable given limited resources. But it left a gap that no later effort could fill, because data missed on the day never comes back.

The race is re-drawn at the eighteenth kilometre

I have drawn a great many split diagrams over more than twenty years of watching athletics, and what made me trust the method was a single occasion when it turned a wrong conclusion into a right one.

In 2026, analysing a cup final in Kenya, I had to reconstruct an entire high-pressing scheme because no spatial data had been published. I had to count it myself. That taught me something: when available data is scarce, an analyst is not permitted to invent — he is required to generate data through disciplined observation.

Apply that principle to Vietnamese athletics and the story changes entirely.

Take the 31st SEA Games, held in Hanoi in May 2026. Nguyen Thi Oanh won gold in the 3000m steeplechase and gold in the 5000m in the same session, the two races separated by less than an hour. On the results sheet you read two times. On the track, the story sat elsewhere: in the second race she did not need to be faster than her rivals across the whole distance — she needed to hold her rhythm through the penultimate lap and open up over the final two hundred metres.

With lap-split data, one thing the results sheet can never tell would become obvious: the victory was engineered in the middle of the race, not in the finishing straight. Which means the entire training load serving that decisive moment had been aimed at a very narrow band — a band nobody measured.

Another example sits in the men's marathon at the 32nd SEA Games in Cambodia in May 2026, where Hoang Nguyen Thanh won gold. Conditions in Siem Reap were early sun, high humidity, and a loop past temple grounds with almost no shade. In that kind of race, the outcome is not decided by anyone's top speed but by whoever accepts losing one segment in order to keep the rest. On a course like that, splits and per-checkpoint temperature are the only two data sets that tell the truth.

Gaps on the track are living things, and they change when someone dares to believe. In Siem Reap that gap changed after the twenty-fifth kilometre, when the lead group broke apart. What matters is that no timing mat recorded that break in enough detail to be used as teaching material for the next generation of runners.

What Kenyans measure, and why the copy fails

One thing the analysis world tends to skip needs saying clearly. Kenya is not strong because it has more data. Kenya is strong because most of its data never needs publishing — it lives inside the athletes' bodies, built over ten years of running at two thousand four hundred metres of altitude, twice a day, on red dirt roads.

Eliud Kipchoge ran 2:01:09 at the Berlin Marathon on 25 September 2026, setting the official world record. Three years earlier, on 12 October 2026, he ran 1:59:40 in Vienna, under two hours — but that mark was never ratified as a world record, because rotating pacemakers and specially designed conditions were involved. That is a double lesson. An extraordinary performance does not automatically become valid data. And valid data is not always the prettiest performance.

Then, on 8 October 2026, Kelvin Kiptum ran 2:00:35 at the Chicago Marathon, taking the world record below the two-hour-one-minute threshold. He died on 11 February 2026 in a road accident. Both milestones came with complete split sheets published within hours of the finish, and it was those split sheets that the sport argued over for years afterwards.

Over the same period in the women's events, Faith Kipyegon set the 1500m world record at 3:49.11 in Florence on 2 June 2026, and Beatrice Chebet set the 10,000m world record at 28:54.14 in Eugene on 25 May 2026. Those records did not come from measuring more. They came from coaches who knew exactly which threshold had to be crossed, in how many seconds, on which lap.

Vietnam's equation is harder. Time, race opportunities and the number of rivals at a comparable level are all far thinner. A Vietnamese 5000m runner might meet only three or four opponents in a year capable of genuinely pushing her. With a sample that small, every outing is decisive, and every outing left unrecorded is a lost chance to recalibrate.

That is why I argue Vietnamese athletics needs splits more than Kenyan athletics does, not less. Kenyans can skip a measurement session because thousands of runners at their level surround them for comparison. Vietnamese runners have no such safety net.

The blind spot is a decision, not a machine

The most common explanation for missing data is missing equipment. I do not buy it.

A stopwatch costs almost nothing. A notebook costs less. One person standing at a fixed marker — the cost of a manual split point is close to zero. The problem is not that organisers cannot afford devices. The problem is that in the current coaching culture, mid-race data is not considered worth recording.

I have heard the same line many times in conversations with coaches: the athlete runs on feel, and good feel produces good results. That is partly true. But feel cannot be handed to the next person. A good coach can see an athlete lose rhythm on the third lap; a good coach plus a split notebook can show an entire generation of future athletes that the lost rhythm on lap three happened because of the surge on lap two.

There is a counter-argument worth taking seriously. If everything is recorded, will coaches be led by data into ignoring an athlete's actual condition? My answer is yes, and that is a real risk, not a formality. I have watched it happen across many sports, where one composite metric gets used to explain everything — form, decisions, even officiating — until it becomes the answer to all questions and therefore answers none.

The second risk is more dangerous: imposing the Kenyan analytical frame on Vietnamese athletes without accounting for differences in foundation. Kenyan runners grow up at altitude, on dirt roads, inside a culture where running is the main profession. Vietnamese runners grow up inside a school system, train on stadium tracks, and for the most part must still balance sport against livelihood. Taking a Kenyan training load and applying it directly to a Vietnamese athlete, then acting surprised by the injuries, is a mistake that has already happened several times.

What is striking is that both risks come from the same root: recording without understanding why. A split notebook filled in completely but never read again is as meaningless as a blank column.

Gaps on the track are living things, and they change when someone dares to believe. But a gap only changes for the better when somebody reads it back the day after the race, when the legs have rested and the head is still clear.

What to watch on the roads ahead

In the current major-championship cycle, national teams will arrive with plans prepared over years. What I want to know is not who wins gold. What I want to know is whether, at this year's national championships, somebody will be standing at the 5km mark with a notebook in hand.

If they are, I will verify it myself by comparing this year's split sheet against last year's, to see at which lap a given athlete changed tactics. If they are not, I will keep writing about blank columns, and keep timing by hand, as I have done for more than twenty years.

Elite sport is not decided at the finish line. It is decided at some point out on the course, where one person chooses not to surge and another chooses to. As long as that point stays blank on paper, every analysis remains an educated guess.

Readers can verify this at any upcoming meet: pick one athlete, record their times at three checkpoints with your own stopwatch, then compare against the official results. If the official results lack those checkpoints, then the gap was never on the track.