Taolu and Sanda: Two Reference Systems That Vietnamese Martial Arts Media Still Merge Into One

At a youth wushu tournament held in Nha Trang, I sat in the fourth row, close enough to hear the intake of breath before the form began. A seventeen-year-old female athlete stepped onto the mat, her competition robe still dusted with powder, and performed her changquan routine in exactly forty seconds. When the judging panel raised their scorecards, the reporter sitting beside me turned and said: “That girl definitely fought better than the one in red.”

I said nothing. He was comparing two things that cannot be compared by eye. A taolu score is not measured by a feeling of being better. It is measured by technical scale, difficulty of movement, stability of the body axis, landing error — numbers locked in before the athlete steps onto the mat. The man beside me, and not a few of our colleagues, was reading one sport through the reference system of another.

Every season has its own heartbeat; you only have to be willing to listen. The heartbeat of Vietnam's martial arts scene in recent years has been off-beat in exactly that place.

Between taolu and sanda lies an invisible wall

Vietnamese martial arts today contain at least three parallel streams that the press habitually lumps together under the two words “vo thuat”. The first is performance disciplines — wushu taolu, karate kata, taekwondo poomsae — where results are decided by a judging panel applying a technical criteria set. The second is combat disciplines — sanda, boxing, Muay, vovinam fighting — where victory is decided by referees or by live scoring on the mat. The third is traditional martial arts, where performance value and combat value blend in ways no scoring scale fully captures.

These three streams run on three different logics. A report about a taolu athlete must understand routine difficulty, the mandatory sequence of movements, the coefficient applied to each technical group. A report about a sanda athlete must understand rounds, valid scoring strikes, and deductions for prolonged clinching. Merging them into one story about “Vietnamese martial arts winning again” is a way of writing that makes readers misunderstand both sides.

I once sat in a press room after a SEA Games. A colleague asked a coach why his athlete “only won silver even though the routine looked better”. The coach was silent for a few seconds and then answered: “Beautiful is not on the scorecard.” I copied that line verbatim into my notebook. It sums up the entire problem.

When technical numbers are read through emotion

Wushu taolu is scored across two main groups: movement quality and difficulty. Every acrobatic, spinning, or balancing movement carries its own technical code and its own scoring coefficient. A routine can look fluid to the audience yet lose points for a half-second landing error, or for missing a mandatory Group A movement. Conversely, a routine that looks somewhat rough can still climb the standings by accumulating difficulty.

Sanda runs the opposite way. Here, the audience's sense of “who hits harder” tends to match the result more closely, because outcomes rest on the number of valid strikes, the number of times an opponent is pushed off the platform, and deductions. An athlete can throw many visually striking strikes and still lose if most of them are not counted as valid — because the force was insufficient or the strike landed on a prohibited area.

These two reference systems cannot be swapped. When a reporter writes about taolu using the language of sanda — “relentless attack”, “overwhelming the opponent” — readers will think they are reading about a fight. When a reporter writes about sanda using the language of taolu — “a smooth routine”, “beautiful bearing” — they are skipping exactly the things that decide the bout.

That is why I keep a separate notebook for each discipline. For wushu, I record movement codes and coefficients first, and impressions afterward. For sanda, I record valid strikes per round first, and the flow of the bout afterward. The order of note-taking determines the order of thinking.

What is worth noting is that vovinam — the martial art founded by Vietnamese people — stands on both banks. It has a system of forms and demonstrative techniques graded on a technical scale, and it also has a fighting division scored on the mat. A vovinam athlete can compete in both divisions at the same Games, but the way we read their results in each must be entirely different.

The reverse angle: the confusion is not with the audience

The familiar explanation is that ordinary fans do not understand the rules. I do not think so. Across many years in the stands, I have seen viewers grasp rules faster than we assume, provided the person reporting takes the trouble to explain once, correctly. The confusion lies with the writer, not the reader.

The most common error is turning a martial art into a purely emotional narrative. A taolu athlete is not fighting anyone inside their routine. A sanda athlete is not performing for the audience. When we force them into one shared narrative mold, we do not make the story more compelling — we only make it blurrier.

People remember medals; I remember a coach saying “beautiful is not on the scorecard”. A small sentence, but enough to reset an entire way of writing.

The next signal to watch

The quiet star of Nha Trang never goes out — and this time, I want to look at the athletes the press has never once named correctly by discipline. I write slowly because I want to remember for a long time, like the person keeping the rhythm for the whole arena.

The signal to watch next season is not the medal count, but the way newsrooms separate their coverage. If an outlet starts splitting taolu and sanda into distinct sections, that is a sign Vietnam's martial arts scene is entering a stage of genuine professionalization in information terms, not just at the tournament level. If the merging continues, the stumble I once lived through will keep repeating — just at a larger scale.