Teqball's First Entry, Karate Extends: Vietnam's Two Bronze Medals at Asiad 20

Trinh Gia Nghi's final touch fell exactly into the curved corner of the table — where the wooden surface bends along a trajectory that the eye struggles to predict. The ball bounced, and India's Dsouza Quimcy Joaquim and Beg Mohamed Anas Imran lunged in the right direction but a fraction of a second too late. The score closed at 2-0. Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan stood still for a beat, both hands braced on the table edge, before turning to shake hands with his opponents. Rewatching the footage, that small pause before joy broke out caught my attention. It resembles the way a referee lowers the whistle — confirming the situation is closed, only then allowing emotion to enter.

That was Teqball Vietnam's first continental medal, and also the Vietnamese delegation's first bronze at Asiad 20, in the mixed doubles event. Notably, this sport is being introduced to an Asiad programme for the very first time. There is no precedent, no historical comparison, no old results table to reference. Everything starts from zero.

I have followed Teqball since it was still an experimental game on artificial turf in Europe. Its rules are fairly compact: players may use any body part except hands and arms, each side may touch the ball a maximum of three times before sending it across, and the ball cannot be touched twice consecutively with the same body part. The ball must travel back and forth over the curved table and may not fall to the floor. It sounds simple, but placed in elite competition conditions, it becomes an extremely demanding exercise in controlling space and time.

One point I want to make before going into analysis: the quality of a medal does not lie in its colour, but in the context in which it was created. A bronze in a sport with a thirty-year depth is entirely different from a bronze in a sport newly added to the programme. Both are medals. But the information density within them differs.

Teqball was born in Hungary in 2026, developed by Gábor Borsányi and Viktor Huszár with a curved table that can be split in two to serve both football and table tennis. Within a decade, it spread to more than a hundred countries, gained a world championship, and now an Asiad stage. That growth rate is so rapid that many national sports federations have not yet built proper training systems. Vietnam is in that group. But with one difference: we have a very thick foundation of grassroots football technique, and Teqball is essentially football compressed onto a table.

Replaying the two matches of the Minh Tan — Gia Nghi pair, I noted four verifiable data points. First, their success rate on the third touch was markedly higher than their Indian opponents; most of their points came on the second and third touches, meaning after they had pulled the opponent out of a balanced position. Second, Gia Nghi almost never used her right foot to handle the ball on the side of the table — she used thigh and chest, which forced the Indian pair to anticipate direction earlier and often guess wrong. Third, Minh Tan held the anchor role at the rear of the table, minimising forward advances, and only unleashed the decisive strike once the ball had passed the second touch. Fourth, the Vietnamese pair barely lost a service sequence — an index that in Teqball doubles is considered the measure of psychological stability.

What makes a Teqball pair different is not individual technique, but the ability to divide space before the ball arrives. Both Minh Tan and Gia Nghi stood in what I call the "correct waiting zone" — not the centre of the table, but the intersection between the most likely ball trajectory and the most awkward one. When you stand correctly, you gain an extra half-second; in Teqball, half a second is the entire match.

This is what quick news reports usually skip when they merely record the 2-0 scoreline. A scoreline does not tell the story. A scoreline is only the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Immediately after that historic bronze, the Vietnam Teqball team missed a chance for another medal. In the men's doubles bronze match on the morning of 20 September, Ba Truong Giang and Le Anh Khoa lost to the Iraqi pair. I do not have detailed data on this match to analyse every rally, and I will not write what I cannot verify. But one thing can be said without speculation: the gap between a medal and a defeat at continental level is usually decided by details that never appear on the scoreboard — the ability to hold rhythm after losing the first point, how to handle an opponent switching tactics mid-match, and most importantly, the ability to forget the score immediately in front of you.

The first mistake is not meant to be forgotten, but to serve as a benchmark. A team newly stepping onto the continental stage always has a first stumble. Its value lies in this: you keep it as a ruler, and next time you know how far you have come from that marker.

The same morning, in Karate, another bronze came from Bui Ngoc Nhi in the women's individual kata event. This is an entirely different story in nature. Kata is not direct combat; it is a performance of a standardised sequence of movements, and scores come from judges based on technique, power, rhythm, balance and precision of each motion. In other words, this is a sport where the result depends on whether you execute what you have rehearsed thousands of times — there is no opponent to read, only yourself.

Ngoc Nhi lost to Japan's Ono Maho, the host athlete, 0-5 in the opening bout. That is a heavy result. In Kata, a 0-5 score is not a match dominated tactically; it is a gap in technical points across every criterion. But afterwards, she defeated Choi Haeun of South Korea 5-0 and Leong Wai Yee Shannon of Singapore 4-1 to take bronze.

That turn deserves analysis. In Kata, the hardest thing is not performing a perfect routine when you are excited. The hardest thing is performing it when you have just been scored 0-5 in front of judges, spectators and yourself. It is a psychological test, and Ngoc Nhi passed it in a way I consider structured: she did not change her routine, did not try to overdo it, but tightened every small detail.

In Kata, the correct response after a defeat is not to be stronger, but to be more precise. Power can be scored as performance; precision is always awarded. Ngoc Nhi chose the second path.

This achievement continues her marks at SEA Games 33 and Asian youth tournaments. Still young, she already has a run of results that many martial artists spend an entire career building. And Asiad 20 is not over for her: Ngoc Nhi and her teammates enter the women's team kata quarter-finals against Nepal on 22 September.

Here I want to return to the larger question: what do these two bronzes say about Vietnam's delegation at Asiad 20?

On the overall table, after nearly half a day of competition, China leads with 2 golds, 4 silvers and 1 bronze. Athlete Lin Xinyu, in the women's triathlon, brought China its first gold at Asiad 20. Host Japan is second with 2 golds and 3 bronzes. Macao, South Korea and Kazakhstan each have 1 gold, ranking third to fifth. Vietnam sits ninth with 2 bronzes.

There are two ways to read this table. The first, popular and comfortable: Vietnam has medals on day one, a positive start. The second, less spoken: ninth place with two bronzes at this stage reflects the true nature of a race where results are decided by sports with deep training systems.

I lean toward the second, but not out of pessimism. I think the table should be read as a map of resource allocation, not as a ranking of national capability. China leading on day one was predicted years ago; what is notable is that in new sports like Teqball, major delegations do not automatically win — because there, the training-system gap is compressed, and opportunities are shared more evenly among countries that know how to seize them.

Asiad 20 is showing one thing: new sports are the shortest door for delegations without system depth. Teqball is the first example. But a short door does not mean an easy door. It only means that there, you do not have to race against someone else's thirty years of history — you only have to race against your own preparation.

That is also why I want to spend the rest of this article on what I call the blind spot in how we usually view medals.

The crowd loves the story of the underdog overthrowing the favourite. It has traffic, emotion, drama. But when you follow a weak team all year, you understand that miracles are not free. Every moment of triumph on the scoreboard is the result of a long period of quiet preparation that nobody streams, nobody shares, nobody counts in views.

An empty pitch still holds the same rules; people simply see more clearly when there is no noise. I wrote that line from my own experience during the period when competitions were suspended years ago. When there were no spectators in the stands, when newsrooms were left with only the patient ones, I learned that the true value of a team — or a martial artist, or a Teqball pair — shows most clearly in training sessions nobody watches.

For Vietnam Teqball, the question is not what this bronze means in the present. The question is: after Asiad 20, will we build a training system for this sport before it becomes highly competitive at future Games?

The history of many new sports is quite similar. In the early phase, few countries have proper training systems, and medal opportunities are relatively wide. After a few cycles, major delegations enter with budgets, experts and selection systems, and opportunities narrow quickly. Those who build foundations while the door is still wide will hold their position when the door narrows.

This is the silent data few notice. Data stays silent until someone asks the right question. The right question here is not "how many medals do we have", but "how many years of preparation do we have before this sport becomes difficult".

I follow matches of Vietnamese national teams across many sports, and there is a recurring pattern I record in my notebook. We often have individuals or pairs achieving outstanding results in the early phase of a new sport, but lack the structure to turn that individual achievement into a sustainable foundation. With Ngoc Nhi in Karate, we are lucky to have a longer-established system. With Minh Tan and Gia Nghi in Teqball, we stand at the starting point.

A referee does not create mistakes, they merely record what the rules already contain. Nor do I create any problem for Vietnamese sport by saying this. The problem already exists in the structure; I am merely placing it on the table clearly.

There is another angle I want to present honestly, even if it is not pleasant to hear. When a new sport first appears at an Asiad, the number of qualifying slots is small, the number of participating delegations is not yet large, and the competitive baseline has not been established. A medal at this stage does not prove we are at continental class; it proves we were present at the right time and prepared enough to seize the moment.

This does not diminish the value of Minh Tan and Gia Nghi's bronze. It only places the medal in its correct position on the development map. A medal through an open door is not the same as a medal through a closed door. Both are precious, but we need to know which door we are at so as not to fool ourselves about our real standing.

And I want to say the same about Ngoc Nhi's bronze, in the opposite direction. In Karate Kata, the continental competitive baseline was established long ago, with Japan as the scoring powerhouse. A bronze here is born under harder conditions in terms of opponents, but is more predictable in terms of structure. Ngoc Nhi losing to Japan 0-5 then beating South Korea 5-0 and Singapore 4-1 shows something important: she can adjust her scoring to the scenario, and that is the skill of a martial artist trained across many competition levels.

The emotions of home fans are justified, and I understand them. Seeing two medals after nearly half a day of competition, seeing Vietnam's name at ninth on the overall table, fans have the right to be happy. That is a natural human response to a positive result. I do not stand above that emotion. I merely stand at a different point to see what lies behind it.

But for the same reason, I believe analysing the true nature of the achievement does not reduce the joy. It gives the joy more weight. A medal understood correctly will live longer than a medal inflated.

So what will I watch in the remaining days of Asiad 20?

With Ngoc Nhi, I will watch the women's team kata quarter-final against Nepal on 22 September. This is an event different in nature from individual: there, scores depend on synchronisation among members, and synchronisation is measurable through video analysis. If the Vietnamese team maintains a shared breathing rhythm in the first ten to fifteen seconds of the routine, I believe they have a chance to go deep.

With Teqball, I will watch whether more Vietnamese pairs advance to medal matches, and if so, whether their approach repeats the Minh Tan — Gia Nghi pattern — divide space first, handle technique after — or not. That is a sign that we have a method, not just a few talented individuals.

And I will watch the overall table, but differently from usual. I am not watching the ranking. I am watching the movement of delegations in the sports where we have athletes competing, because that is the index reflecting our true position in each specific field.

Back to the moment that opened this article. When Trinh Gia Nghi struck the ball one last time into the curved corner, nobody in the arena knew that it would be the first bronze of a sport still unfamiliar to Vietnamese fans themselves. Minh Tan and Gia Nghi probably were not thinking of that at that moment. They were simply doing what they had rehearsed: standing in the right position, waiting for the right rhythm, and sending the ball across to the other side of the table.

There is one thing I have always believed in my profession, after years standing at the edge of arenas and rewatching every rally. The most beautiful moment of a sport is not when the medal is hung around a neck. It is the long period before that, when nobody knows what will happen, and a few people still choose to keep working without any guarantee of the outcome.

Asiad 20 still has many competition days ahead. The overall table will change dozens of times. But Vietnam Teqball's first bronze will not change its place in history: it is the first marker, and every first marker has a value no later medal can replace.

The question I keep for myself, and for those interested in the long-term path of Vietnamese sport, is this: when Teqball is no longer new at future Asiads, will we still be standing there, in the right position, at the right rhythm, sending the ball across to the other side of the table — or will we have only a beautiful memory of the first time?