Vietnam's first Asiad 20 bronze: Teqball breaks through, Karate keeps the beat

In the Teqball mixed doubles bronze medal match at Asiad 20, Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan and Trinh Gia Nghi beat India's Dsouza Quimcy Joaquim and Beg Mohamed Anas Imran 2-0. That bronze was Vietnam's first medal of these Games, and the first continental medal for Vietnamese Teqball.

I rewatched the match twice, a habit I have kept for years: once to follow the flow, once to write every touch into a notebook. What stayed with me was the way the two players moved the ball across the curved table. The ball was never held; it was only sent on, and every time it left a foot, both players had to read where the other would be.

In Teqball, individual technique is only a precondition; in doubles, what decides the match is the ability to read the rhythm of the person standing beside you.

Teqball combines elements of football and table tennis. Players compete on a curved table, using feet, thighs, chest and head to send the ball into the opponent's half, with no hands allowed. In doubles, the number of touches is counted for the pair as a whole before the ball must cross the table, so the two players have to share the rhythm instead of each keeping the ball their own way. Ball control, reflexes and mutual understanding are therefore not secondary requirements — they are the entire event.

Asiad 20 is the first Games to include Teqball in the official programme. For Vietnam, the sport is still unfamiliar: there is no national league deep enough to produce specialised athletes, very few training venues meet international competition standards, and most players come from grassroots football, futsal or informal settings. In other words, Minh Tan and Gia Nghi walked into a continental arena while their own sport had no real home court.

There were no spectators in the hall, yet I could still hear the pulse of a whole group. A national Teqball team is remarkably small: a handful of athletes, a thin coaching staff, a part-time communications desk. Every medal won by such a small group therefore carries a different weight from medals in sports that have been invested in properly for years.

Vietnam's rhythm at Asiad 20 did not stop there. Right after Minh Tan and Gia Nghi's bronze, the Vietnamese Teqball team missed a chance for another medal when Ba Truong Giang and Le Anh Khoa lost to the Iraqi pair in the men's doubles bronze medal match on the morning of 20 September. The distance between a medal and a defeat in the same session, in the same sport, shows how tight the competition at this level is.

In Karate, athlete Bui Ngoc Nhi added another bronze for Vietnam in the women's individual kata event, also on the morning of 20 September. She lost her opening bout to host athlete Ono Maho 0-5, then beat Choi Haeun of South Korea 5-0 and Leong Wai Yee Shannon of Singapore 4-1 to take the medal.

Some defeats are not measured by the score, but by the look in their eyes as they leave the mat. I write from there. The 0-5 loss to Ono Maho did not end Ngoc Nhi's run, because the kata format allows an athlete beaten in the main bracket to keep competing for medals through the repechage. The format does not erase defeat, but it does measure the ability to get back up: from 0-5 in the opening bout, Ngoc Nhi lifted her results to 5-0 and then 4-1. This follows the marks she has already made at SEA Games 33 and at Asian youth events.

At Asiad 20, Ngoc Nhi still has a chance for another medal when she and her teammates enter the women's team kata quarter-finals against Nepal on 22 September.

After nearly half a day of competition, China moved to the top of the medal table with 2 golds, 4 silvers and 1 bronze; athlete Lin Xinyu in the women's triathlon delivered China's first gold of the Games. Host Japan sits second with 2 golds and 3 bronzes. Macau, South Korea and Kazakhstan each have 1 gold, ranking third to fifth. Vietnam is currently ninth with 2 bronzes.

That position is easily read as a slow start, and the two bronzes are easily seen as the product of events where Vietnam holds no strength and therefore cannot be scaled up. Such a reading overlooks the fact that both Teqball and women's individual kata belong to the group of events where Vietnam has no advantage in the number of entrants. In events like these, medals come from a few individuals being prepared in the right direction, not from squad depth.

One more thing the medal table does not show: overall standings at an Asiad are decided by gold medals first, so two bronzes say nothing about the real standing of a sporting system. They only indicate which events currently have athletes capable of pushing into the continental top group, and which need more time.

For Teqball, the fact that the sport is new to the Asiad does not mean the opponents are new too. Many countries in the region and on the continent have run national competitions and sent athletes to international events regularly since long before Teqball entered the Games programme. The bronze of Minh Tan and Gia Nghi therefore came from a small group willing to train in poorer conditions than their rivals, not from luck.

The internal signal worth watching in the coming days lies in two places: the women's team kata quarter-final against Nepal on 22 September, and the remaining Teqball events, where the gap between a medal and a defeat is measured in a few touches of the ball. Based on my experience covering matches at previous Games, new sports tend to move through exactly one cycle like this: a first medal, then the hardest phase — keeping the athlete pool and the competition calendar going.

From a mocked first post to a series that got read, I learned this: the truth never loses its rhythm. What I am waiting for in the coming days is not a prettier medal table, but a sign that sports without a home court are beginning to have a roadmap.