Blurry scorecards at the National Traditional Martial Arts Championship: When a rhythm keeper hears the breathing of a scoring system

On March 16, 2026, at the Quan Khu 7 Gymnasium, I stood at the edge of the technical area when an experienced judge left the scoring table. He held a paper with crossed-out marks: the score for the martial arts form “Lao Ho Thuong Son” performed by Tran Quoc Huy had been changed from 9.10 to 8.90. Two other judges had scored the same performance 8.35 and 9.15. The official board displayed 8.80, but no explanation was given for the 0.80-point gap. I did not ask immediately. I simply stood still, realizing that at the year’s biggest competition, the most difficult thing to grasp was not a kick or a form, but the way three people looked at the same movement in three different ways. The 2026 National Traditional Martial Arts Championship ran from March 14 to 18 in Ho Chi Minh City, gathering 57 delegations and over 680 athletes. Unlike football or boxing, where results can be verified by goals or clean punches, traditional Vietnamese martial arts forms are judged through performance. The Vietnam Traditional Martial Arts Federation uses a 10-point scale, placing most weight on technical completion, attitude, and spirit. Yet the concepts of “spirit” and “difficulty” have never been uniformly codified. That creates huge gaps in the scoring map. Based on my experience covering martial arts competitions since 2026, I know that a 0.5-point difference between judges is common. But what happened here was not about small decimals. I collected data from internal score sheets shared by an assistant of the judging panel: on the second day, there were 340 individual forms, and 38 of them had a gap greater than 1.0 points between the highest and lowest scores. Notably, 29 of those 38 cases involved aerial movements, directional spins, or one-leg landings. In other words, the more complex the form, the more differently the judges understood it. During a lunch break, I spoke with martial artist Nguyen Van Truc, head judge of several combat categories. He said plainly: “We judge completeness, we do not judge difficulty. If an athlete tries a difficult movement but breaks the form, I deduct heavily.” That answer reflects a longstanding philosophy: traditional martial arts are not gymnastics, where difficulty values are calculated in advance. However, this philosophy creates a paradox. An athlete who sticks to safe, low-risk technique can easily score higher than someone who brings an expressive but risky form. The consequence is visible in recent medal results: many winning forms are becoming very similar because coaches have figured out which movements are safest. That evening, I sat with coach Pham Duc An of the Hanoi delegation. His story centered on his student Tran Quoc Huy, who performed a rare three-spin sequence at the end of his form. In practice, Huy landed it successfully almost every time. During competition, his first landing was slightly off, but he finished strongly. The judges gave him 8.45. A teammate from the same delegation, performing a safer form with no major spatial changes or risky elements, scored 8.90. Pham Duc An did not claim the score was unfair. He asked another question: if an athlete dares to expand their technical range, are we encouraging them? I asked a judge who had scored Quoc Huy’s form. He answered: “I personally added 0.2 points for the difficult intention. But my two colleagues did not do the same.” So discipline is being divided by the very initiative of judges. The federation piloted a 24-page scoring handbook, handed to judges right before the event. The handbook divides errors into three levels: minor, medium, and severe. However, it contains no video or detailed illustrations. When I asked a young judge how to distinguish a medium error from a severe one, he laughed and said: “Based on intuition.” That is why I believe the biggest story in traditional martial arts today is not a shortage of medals or athletes, but the absence of a shared measurement language. People often say Vietnamese traditional martial arts have their own identity and should not be compared to Taekwondo or Karate, which have strict judging systems. That view is not wrong. But it is unintentionally becoming a reason to delay reform. If we look at gymnastics, a discipline of “difficulty, beauty, and precision,” they clearly separate difficulty, execution, and artistry. Vietnamese traditional martial arts can learn to split “difficulty, completeness, and spirit” into three separate axes. But this requires time and data; we cannot impose an outside formula on a heritage-heavy sport. What few people see is that judges are not opposed to reform. They simply lack tools. A female judge with twenty years of experience, Ngo Thi Thanh Thao, told me: “We always want fairness, but what kind of fairness? Without data, I can only look at expressions and listen to other people’s arguments before deciding.” Her words reminded me of a late afternoon at the end of the championship. I left the gymnasium while the arena was still open. I sat down on an empty row, watching the clean floor. Without loud spectators, I could hear the echo from the ceiling. I thought to myself: an athlete can practice one move a thousand times to become perfect, but how many calibration rounds does a scoring system need before it reaches similar reliability? From the perspective of a sports writer, I do not expect the federation to change the entire rulebook before 2027. But I hope they start by collecting data from the score sheets that are now being discarded. Take 40 representative forms from this tournament, record them from multiple angles, send them to ten experienced judges, and ask them to score from video. The comparison will become the first measurement of scoring bias. Then the federation can pilot a “difficulty score” column beside “technical score,” without overturning tradition. If the bias narrows, traditional martial arts can enter a more transparent era. If not, we at least know where to continue adjusting. As I left Ho Chi Minh City, the training hall was still empty of spectators. But the scoreboard is still ringing in my head like an untuned drum.