Filling the Blanks: The Problem of Decoding Vietnamese Traditional Performance Martial Arts When Data Returns N/A

Hanoi, a late summer noon. I opened an analysis file labeled TD-2026 sent by a colleague. I expected a breakdown of a traditional Vietnamese martial arts form: number of beats, angles of rotation, speed of strikes, difficulty of each leg technique. But the screen only displayed four letters that anyone who has worked with sports data hates most: N/A. There was no article content, no extracted information, no core viewpoint, not even a single line describing the performance. The sender added an apology: “The Stage-1 deconstruction result is incomplete.” That sounds like a technical glitch. To me, it reflects a bigger disease in how we write about martial arts in Vietnam: we love conclusions, but we skip the basic work of documentation. When thinking about martial arts, most people imagine fierce combat matches. But in taolu analysis, the focus is not about who defeats whom. The focus is whether the form retains its cultural soul, whether it reaches the required difficulty threshold, and whether an event system can narrate the story of a nation through physical movements. A good martial arts analysis should be like a watchmaker's notebook, capturing every single gear. The analysis I received that day was a paper clock: the casing was there, but the gears were missing. Since SEA Games 2026, I learned not to trust official result tables blindly. Tran Thu Ha ran 11.92 seconds, not 11.72 seconds; I published the wrong time and received 1,400 mocking shares. After that shock, I watched all 12 official tapes, counted every stride and every breath, and built my own manual statistics table. When the 2026 World Cup arrived, I did not rely on Opta. I counted Iceland's 38 clearances, their 340 touches, and saw a whole world in the humility of the underdog. Machine-generated data is not wrong; it is wrong only in the sense that it never asks questions. The TD-2026 analysis is the same. It does not lie, but it never tries to see anything. In football analysis, a common question is how much of a team's ball possession consists of meaningless sideways passes. I transfer that question to martial arts: can a form be 100% technically accurate and still lack depth? Absolutely. You can lift your leg to the exact height and straighten your joints according to the textbook, but no spreadsheet records the braking force of your body when you begin a sweeping strike. The body is a blackboard that coaches never finish reading. That is why I oppose handing over full judging responsibilities to an algorithm. Algorithms can measure joint amplitude, but they cannot measure the anxiety in a fighter's eyes, the heavy breathing at the end of a round, or the choice to slow down as a salute to an old master. Those elements cannot be placed into an N/A cell, but without them, taolu analysis is only a skeleton without flesh. I never hide my failures. In 2026, my “V-League Ảo” series collapsed after six episodes, averaging 12,300 views compared with the usual 120,000. It was a painful wound, but I used it as material. I proposed a talk show called “Sân ảo – Góc nhìn thật” and invited people who had once disliked each other to sit at the same table. From that experience, I learned a principle: every analysis should contain at least two opposing viewpoints. Looking at TD-2026, I asked myself why it had no critic. Was it because no one had looked at the subject from the inside? Was it because the writer assumed martial arts can only be understood through victory? Both reasons are dangerous. In Vietnam, we have a rich heritage of traditional martial arts, from Binh Dinh martial arts and folk wrestling to the Vovinam system founded by Nguyen Loc. But this treasure trove is being narrated in the same old language of achievements, medals, and trophies. A martial artist is praised for knocking out an opponent in an instant, not for keeping steady breathing through 48 difficult movements. If that continues, we will create heroes for the stage, not cultural carriers. The empty analysis that day reminded me of a martial arts school without students: the sign is there, the ritual text is there, but no one is truly training. Once, standing beside a traditional martial arts arena in the north, I counted how many times a certain fighter landed on his left foot after each jumping strike. The official technical sheet said he performed seven jumping strikes, but I counted nine times when the ball of his left foot touched the ground before the heel could release force. That two-touch difference does not change the medal result, but it completely changes the injury story: the risk to the knee multiplies when landing without proper shock absorption. That fact did not appear in any report, but it appeared in the fighter's medical records after three years of training. My job is to find the missing piece that the whole stadium ignores. That piece is usually not in the highlight reel or the statistics column; it lies in the distance between two landings, between two breaths, between two blinks. Back to TD-2026, the story does not stop at an unfinished document. The bigger question is: who should fill these blank cells? If we delegate everything to artificial intelligence, we will receive a dense table of numbers but never understand why a martial arts student slows down at the final section of the form. If we hand it to those who cling to hereditary secrecy, we risk turning analysis into a ritual of hiding knowledge. We need a third generation: people who carry stopwatches and slow-motion cameras, yet remain humble enough to sit down in the sand and listen to a master explain an error passed down from an old generation. The lesson from London 2026, where I began my journalism career after working in Australia, etched a discipline into me: before writing, verify three sources by hand. For performance martial arts, those three sources can be the slow-motion video, the master's spoken account, and the physical feeling when you try a movement yourself. If one of those is missing, the article becomes an analysis without a source, exactly like TD-2026. That deficiency is not just a formal flaw; it is a sign that we are treating martial arts as entertainment rather than as knowledge that must be preserved. I remember an elderly martial arts master saying: “Numbers can help us find the winner, but only stories can help us understand why the loser returns to the arena.” TD-2026 can also become such a story. It reminds me that, in fact, an empty analysis can still deliver a message: if we are unwilling to notice the blank spaces, we will never see what is moving between all the data cells. Imagine a winter day in 2030: a data center for sports crashes in a storm. All numbers are erased. What will sports journalists write? I believe only those who have counted by hand—who have reviewed 12 tapes, sat and counted every touch of Iceland—will still have material to write. Verified statistics are the background, but emotion is the main subject of every piece. And to let emotion land precisely, we must dare to fill the blanks by listening, not by stamping pre-printed ink. What disturbs me the most is not an N/A file. What disturbs me is how many traditional forms have been left blank in the community's memory simply because no one with enough patience was there to count. A 0.2-second mistake can ruin one evening, but an empty method of analysis can take an entire heritage away from the next generation. Pick up a martial arts analysis sheet and ask: which cells are blank, and why are they blank? Because before we celebrate a hero, we need to know exactly how that master moved through space, what he sacrificed on the wooden floor, and what silence he left behind for viewers to keep pursuing. TD-2026, with just four letters of N/A, may be seen as a defective product. I prefer to see it as a memorial marker. On that marker, no champion's name is carved; instead, there is a message for future generations: “Never conclude before you see the whole.” That marker is placed in the middle of a forest of automated scoring. Fill it with your eyes, your ears, your heart, and with the courage to admit being wrong. That is the only way Vietnamese performance martial arts will not become an empty analysis inside our cultural heritage.