The Drumbeat of Vietnam's Traditional Martial Arts Festival: A Heritage Learning to Score Itself

Late April afternoon, at the Phu Tho Sports Hall, the festival drum rolled three times and then fell silent. On the mat, more than twenty delegations of martial artists stood at attention in their stances, eyes fixed on the national flag hanging at the center of the stands. Beside the ring, an elderly man with white hair gripped the railing, murmuring the count under his breath, as if retracing every movement of an ancient form he had known by heart for sixty years. The silence lasted exactly seven seconds, then applause erupted - not thunderous like the roar at My Dinh Stadium, but warm and compressed, the way people clap for something sacred rather than for a goal. When the stadium was empty because of COVID, I heard the loudest sound - longing. This afternoon, amid a packed arena, I heard a different sound trying to rise: the memory of people trying to keep the old drumbeat from sinking into oblivion.

I came here with a notebook and a question that has followed me through years of covering Vietnamese sport: what keeps a martial art alive when the world already has professional fighting, MMA, commercial boxing? The answer does not lie in the scoreboard. It lies in the silence between two drumbeats.

I recorded the detail about that elderly man. He had practiced martial arts since he was sixteen, and came to this festival only to watch once more the form his father had taught him. For two full hours, he asked nothing of the organizers, sought no autograph, took no souvenir photo, said not a word. He just stood there, counting the rhythm, like a keeper of the ledger for a book slowly being forgotten. And I suddenly understood why I chose to devote myself to sport: what I hunt for is always the love story, even when the subject is ancient forms that no one steps forward to claim a medal for.

The national traditional martial arts festival is the largest arena for Vietnam's traditional martial arts lineage, held periodically, gathering hundreds of martial artists from provinces and training centers nationwide. It is where more than a hundred schools converge, from names that have become icons such as Vovinam, Binh Dinh, Tay Son, to local branches with only a few dozen followers. Competitors take part in two main categories: forms and sparring. But for insiders, the boundary between those two categories is the real story.

This year's context was more special than usual. After several seasons disrupted by the pandemic and by funding, delegations have struggled to keep their schools running. Many urban martial arts halls have pivoted to teaching self-defense to office workers, or opening children's classes as a weekend leisure service. Traditional martial arts, once tied to villages, to communal houses, to training sessions on brick yards at dawn, must now compete with air-conditioned gyms and modern martial arts classes advertised through social media videos. Resources have thinned, yet public expectations have not shrunk.

From the stands, I counted about seven hundred people on opening night. That number is not large compared with a top-flight football match, but for a traditional martial arts festival it is a rare high. Among them were nearly two hundred people under twenty-five, many holding phones to record each form for posting online. Their presence is a signal: heritage still has a place, as long as it knows how to tell its own story in the language of the age.

When the forms category began, the atmosphere shifted completely. No longer the pounding roar of sparring, but a silence stretched tight as a string. Each martial artist stepped onto the mat, bowed to the judges, then began a performance lasting from one minute thirty seconds to three minutes. Three judges sat at three corners, each holding a scorecard, grading on a technical scale: precision of stances, decisiveness of hand techniques, rhythm, breathing, and spirit. The maximum total usually falls on a ten-point scale, converted from many sub-criteria.

This is the key point outsiders often miss: an ancient form is not graded as an artistic performance, but as a technical system with clear pass/fail parameters. A stance at the wrong angle loses points, a broken breath between two movements loses points, a glance in the wrong direction can be grounds for losing spirit points. That is, behind the softness of the lines, there exists a set of criteria as strict as gymnastics scoring.

Sitting beside me, a longtime coach of the Binh Dinh delegation explained the scoring. He said the hardest part is grading breathing. Outsiders see only whether a movement is beautiful, but a skilled judge hears the unevenness of breath - when a martial artist forgets to breathe in the right rhythm, the whole form loses its continuity even if the limbs are still in the correct positions. According to him, this is why young martial artists, despite good conditioning and flexibility, often lose to seniors twice their age: they do not yet know how to breathe. In traditional martial arts, doing the movement correctly is only half of doing it right.

I recorded a specific case. A nineteen-year-old female martial artist, representing a central province, performed a long form of nearly three minutes. Her technique left nothing to criticize - solid stances, sharp lines. But in the middle of the form, when shifting from the middle stance to the nail stance, she leaned slightly too far, and her breath cut out by a beat. As a result, she placed fourth, missing the bronze medal by exactly 0.1 point. The third-place winner was less flexible than her, less explosive, but maintained a complete breathing rhythm.

This detail says much about the standards of the traditional lineage. Those who draft the scoring rules place breathing and spirit on par with hard technique. That means, to win at this arena, a martial artist must be someone who adjusts the body like a conductor, not a muscle athlete. This is the root philosophy of Vietnamese traditional martial arts, passed down by predecessors such as Master Nguyen Loc - founder of Vovinam: martial arts is balance, not domination of the opponent.

But when the sparring category began, the story flipped entirely. Here, the criteria are clear as boxing: strike, strike effectively, control the opponent. Three rounds, two minutes each, scored by the number of landed strikes and their impact. A martial artist can win by knockout, by points, or by a situation where the opponent is disqualified. In this arena, there is no room for drift. The crowd roars whenever a beautiful high kick lands, and goes silent when a martial artist is knocked down.

The strange thing is, many spectators come only to wait for the sparring, and leave early during the forms. Outsiders assume sparring is the "real" part and forms are the "show". The reality is the opposite: forms are where the original skill set of a school is preserved, while sparring is the part that adapts to modern sport. A martial art that loses its forms becomes only a variant of kickboxing in traditional clothing.

This mismatch has an economic cause. Sparring tournaments have sponsorship, television, prize money. Ancient forms have nothing but honor. A coach from a southern delegation told me frankly: his school had three young people abandon forms to switch entirely to sparring simply because sparring offers cash prizes. Forms, even when winning the national title, receive only a medal and a certificate. For a family in a rural province, a medal does not pay tuition.

The money story does not stop at the martial artists. The festival itself is a calculation. To hold it at the Phu Tho Sports Hall, with the capacity of a large arena, the organizers must balance venue rental, referee costs, and travel costs for delegations. Revenue comes from sponsorship and allocated state budget, not from tickets. Meanwhile, a small entertainment event on social media can draw hundreds of thousands of views with just a few minutes of livestream. The stage of heritage must now compete with the stage of attention.

This makes me think about the relationship between numbers and memory. Those doing media for the festival are trying to push forms clips onto social media, attaching hashtags that evoke origins. But most of the clips that spread widely are the collisions in the sparring category, with the pull of professional sport. No clip of the elderly man counting the rhythm reaches five thousand views. The silence of heritage cannot generate numbers, and in the attention economy, what cannot generate numbers is easily treated as obsolete.

But here is the point I firmly believe: collective emotion in the stands is a more accurate indicator than the judges' scorecard. The applause for the elderly man counting the rhythm lasted longer than the applause for any sparring champion in that same festival. The drumbeat in any stand shares one pulse: love of the game, however different the sound.

This is where I reach the hardest part of the article. There is a common misunderstanding, both domestically and in international media, that Vietnamese traditional martial arts must "modernize" to survive - meaning switching to MMA, dropping forms, keeping only sparring, adopting international rules. Supporters of this view argue that current traditional martial arts tournaments lack appeal, have no worthy opponents, lack competitiveness, and are therefore only a "grassroots playground". They say that without change, traditional martial arts will become a calisthenics discipline for the elderly.

I think that view overlooks a structural truth. Traditional martial arts do not exist to produce the best sparring fighters - that is the task of professional combat sports. Traditional martial arts exist to preserve a technical system and a philosophy of movement bound tightly to village culture, to belief, to the history of national defense. It is both sport and living museum. When we turn a living museum into a fighting ring, we do not make it stronger; we make it disappear.

Let me be clear: Vietnamese traditional martial arts schools possess a considerable number of hand-to-hand techniques and grappling locks, systematized over many generations. This technical body is not inferior to many major regional lineages in terms of the number of techniques. The problem lies in the ability to organize and transmit, not in the quality of the technique. So the right question is not "how to make traditional martial arts become MMA", but "how to let young people see the value of the technical body their ancestors left behind, while still being able to make a living from martial arts".

The answer, I believe, lies in separating two goals. One is preserving forms as cultural assets, with state support and cultural funds. Two is developing sparring as a sport capable of commercialization, with sponsorship, television, and a ranking system. Merging both goals into a single festival is what keeps both from growing: forms lack funding, sparring lacks professionalism. Organizers are trying to carry both, and carrying both forever is exhausting.

During the festival days, I came across a group of young people recording forms for short-video platforms. One young man told me he practices traditional martial arts because he prefers forms to sparring, but he prefers sparring because he gets "more screen time". That remark sounded like a joke, but it tells exactly the contradiction unfolding in the hearts of the young. They love heritage, but heritage does not give them the conditions to love sustainably.

The drumbeat in any stand shares one pulse: love of the game. And the love of the game does not distinguish between sparring and forms. Only policy and money distinguish them. Fans do not need me to give them a voice; they need me to stand on the side of that voice, so that next year's festival still has martial artists daring to step out and bow once more.

When I left the Phu Tho Sports Hall near midnight, the elderly man counting the rhythm was still standing there. He did not go home, even as the organizers dimmed the lights to clean up. What was he waiting for? Perhaps he was waiting for a new generation to step onto the mat, count the rhythm as he once did, and keep the ancient form from losing its trail. I believe he will not have to wait alone.

The signal I will watch for next season is this: among the delegations registered for next year's festival, will the number of martial artists entering the forms category rise again? If it rises, that is a sign that preservation efforts have begun to bear fruit. If it keeps falling, we must accept a harsh reality: Vietnam's traditional forms are slowly being abandoned by the very people who love them, not for lack of passion, but for lack of a path to survive.

And in the silence between two drumbeats, I hear what I always hear in every sport: a community trying not to let its memory be forgotten. I will be there, next year, recording that pulse from the stands - as I always do, whether it is football or traditional martial arts.

In closing, what I want to carry away from this festival is not a medal list, but a question sent to sports policymakers: do we have the courage to separate cultural value from medal metrics, so that traditional martial arts can live on its own terms, instead of being forced into the clothing of professional sport? The answer will decide the fate of hundreds of ancient forms - and the fate of those who count the rhythm, like the old man tonight.

I am grateful to those who stood long enough to listen to an ancient drumbeat in an age of short attention. It is a pulse no algorithm can measure, and perhaps that is also why I still write about sport after all these years.