Sepak Takraw at ASIAD 20: The Gold Medal and Vietnamese Sport's Two-Tier Reward Architecture

In an empty arena, when the stands hold only a few hundred people and the street noise cannot pass through the concrete walls, I hear something a television camera never captures. The sound of the woven ball — made of rattan or flexible plastic, hand-woven into a twelve-hole sphere — touching the top of a bare foot and bouncing up with a dry, crisp note, almost like a knock on wood. When the arena is empty, I hear the breathing of the match more clearly. And in that quiet moment, between the scissor kick and the chest trap, I realised something that many Vietnamese fans had just celebrated but perhaps had not yet looked at closely: behind the women's sepak takraw gold medal at ASIAD 20 in Nagoya lies more than a sporting victory. Behind it lies a two-tier reward architecture — state and municipal — designed down to the last number, and it is that architecture which is the real story of Vietnamese sport right now. I have spent most of my life reading the rhythm of matches. Badminton, football, athletics, swimming — to me, every sport speaks the same language, only with different dialects. But there are times when the language is not on the field, but in the documents signed off it. The women's sepak takraw gold that Vietnam's delegation won at this edition of the continental Games is a victory on the court, but it opens another door — the door of money, policy, and the tiers that most spectators never see. Let me tell it from the beginning, slowly, the way I tell it when I follow a young athlete before the media has turned its spotlight on them. Sepak takraw is a sport whose age is bound tightly to Southeast Asia. Players use feet, knees, chest, shoulders and even the head to send a woven ball over a net, competing in teams, without using hands. If football was born to plant the seed of mass frenzy, sepak takraw was born to honour the precision of body parts we normally do not think can be controlled so exactly. It is the sport of control. The interesting thing is that sepak takraw is not governed by the Badminton World Federation. The two sports are entirely different in nature, rules, governing body and tournament system. Sepak takraw is administered by the International Sepaktakraw Federation ISTAF and the Asian Sepaktakraw Federation ASTAF, contested at continental multi-sport Games under the Olympic Council of Asia. If you ever thought the two could share one analytical framework, you were wrong. And this is the point I want you to remember. Watching sepak takraw matches over the years, I have noticed one thing: this is a sport where economics decides a great deal about its existence at national-team level. Sepak takraw has no professional league system with tens of thousands of dollars per match like football. It has no year-round international tour with lucrative sponsorship contracts. In Vietnam, sepak takraw lives mainly on state budget and achievement-based bonuses. This creates a feature: for a sepak takraw athlete, the medal is not only glory, but years of income. A continental Games gold can change a family's financial circumstances. This is a reality mainstream audiences rarely notice, because the media says 'gold', says 'glory', but seldom says 'until the next Games'. But the real story lies elsewhere. It lies in the numbers. And the numbers, in this case, tell a more complex story than their glittering surface suggests. At the twentieth Asian Games, held in the Japanese city of Nagoya, Vietnam's women's sepak takraw team won gold in the three-player team event. In the official report announcing the achievement, three athletes are mentioned in the reward section, two of them named in full: Nguyen Thi Thu Trang and Nguyen Thi Khanh Ly. Both are on the Hanoi sports payroll. The third member of the team — who contributed equally to the gold — is not named in the article. The event photograph is credited to reporter Bui Luong. The silence around the third name is worth pausing over. I do not want to read a negative meaning into it, but I want to read it as an editorial signal. When an article names two athletes and leaves the third blank, it usually means the named pair belong to the locality the paper serves. Hanoi cares about Hanoi athletes. That is a natural law of local journalism. And when you read the reward section closely, you see that this silence is not only about identity, but about money. But let me go in order. Every shock comes from a child we failed to notice. Here, the child we failed to notice may be the third athlete — carrying a third of the gold's labour but potentially receiving far less than two teammates, for purely administrative reasons. I say 'potentially' because I do not yet have full information on the third athlete's payroll affiliation. But the reward structure gives me enough to ask the question. Before turning to the money, let me reconstruct the sporting context. ASIAD is one of the largest multi-sport continental Games, held every four years under the OCA. For sepak takraw specifically, this is the most prestigious stage, because the Southeast Asian nations — the sport's cradle — always treat the continental Games as a place to assert status. Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and Laos all have traditions. A gold here means overcoming the region's toughest rivals. So in terms of honour, the value of this medal is beyond debate. But the angle I want you to notice is different: precisely because sepak takraw in Vietnam has no self-sustaining professional market, state and local bonuses play a decisive role in athletes' lives. For a footballer, a state bonus is a small part of income, because he also has club salary, image rights and sponsorship deals. For a sepak takraw athlete, such a bonus can be the main income, and long-running monthly stipends matter even more. This is why I say: to understand a sport, sometimes you have to read the budget sheet, not just the scoreboard. Now to the core. Vietnam's reward regime for international achievements is set by a government decree numbered 349/2026/ND-CP. It establishes the base reward and a special preferential-treatment regime. For a continental Games gold, each athlete receives 280 million dong. In addition, the athlete receives a special preferential stipend of 20 million dong per month, running from the result until the next Games. This period is equivalent to about 48 months, i.e. four years. Multiplied out, 20 million dong a month for 48 months yields 960 million dong. Adding the one-off 280 million dong to the 960 million dong stipend, each athlete receives about 1.24 billion dong from the state budget. For all three athletes, the total state funding is about 3.72 billion dong — nearly four billion dong. This is the figure the official article emphasises. And it is accurate. But it is not the whole story. Because Vietnamese sport operates on a two-tier model. The first tier is the state, with the decree as the floor. The second tier is the locality, with its own policy as the add-on. And in this second tier, Hanoi — which has two athletes on its payroll — has issued a supplementary reward policy: Resolution No. 82/2026/NQ-HDND of the Hanoi People's Council. Under this resolution, each Hanoi athlete who wins a continental Games gold receives an additional one-off 140 million dong. At the same time, that athlete receives a special municipal stipend of 33.5 million dong per month, also running for about 48 months until the next Games. Multiplied out, 33.5 million dong times 48 months yields about 1.608 billion dong. Adding the one-off 140 million dong, the total each Hanoi athlete receives from the city is about 1.748 billion dong. Let me rewrite this in the language of the match, because that is how I understand the world. If the state amount is the first serve — certain, legal, visible to all — then the Hanoi amount is the drop shot that spectators only notice on replay. It does not appear on national news. It is not widely covered across the country. But it changes the athlete's financial picture more than the state amount does. If you combine both tiers, a Hanoi athlete receives about 1.24 billion dong from the state plus 1.748 billion dong from the city, roughly three billion dong. With two Hanoi athletes, the total is around six billion dong from these two sources alone. That is half again larger than the 'nearly four billion' the headline mentions. And there is one more party. The coach — in this case Hoang Thi Thai Xuan. Under the current regime, a coach who trains a medallist receives 50% of an athlete's entitlement. So, for the state portion, the coach receives about 50% of 1.24 billion dong, roughly 620 million dong. This is a detail rarely mentioned by the media, but it shows the system does not forget the person behind. It links the teacher's interest to the student's achievement — a deliberately designed incentive mechanism. There is also a further payment known as a 'hot bonus'. This is cash handed over on the spot, decided by the delegation, in this case 200 million dong, and it sits outside the amounts calculated above. In addition, there are rewards from the federation and sponsors, but the article states clearly these are not included in the total, and the specific amounts are not disclosed. This is the final grey zone of the picture. I want you to notice one thing about this architecture. It is not a single cash payment. It is a structured system: a one-off payment to celebrate, and a long-running stipend to secure a livelihood. This design is entirely different from the prize-money model of global professional sports. At a tennis Grand Slam, you win, you take the money and you are on your own. Here, the Vietnamese state chooses long-term payment, turning a medal into a cyclical income stream. In theory, this design is good for athletes because it gives them stability. But it also creates dependence: the true value of the reward depends on whether the stipend is maintained for the full 48 months. And this is where I need to turn to the counterintuitive angle. The official article celebrates the gold as a collective achievement. That is true. Three athletes stand on the podium together, sing the anthem together, raise their hands together. But when you look at the reward structure, you see something the celebration does not say: within the same gold-winning team, one person receives nearly double another, purely because of administrative payroll. Let me calculate again. A Hanoi athlete receives about three billion dong from two tiers. A non-Hanoi athlete receives only about 1.24 billion dong from the state tier, plus whatever their locality — if any — adds. If the third athlete's locality has no policy similar to Hanoi's, the gap between the two could reach nearly 1.8 billion dong. That is a large gap within a collective where each person carries a third of the labour. I do not say this to diminish the gold. I say it because sport, at its deepest level, is an incentive system. And an incentive system that pays differently for the same result, based only on where one is registered athletically, sends an inconsistent signal. That signal can affect team morale and, further, how localities allocate scouting resources. If I were a young coach in a poor province, I would ask myself: is it fair when my athlete achieves the same result but receives far less? And if I were a parent weighing a child's sporting career, I would look at this structure and do the arithmetic. This is where I want to read rhythm rather than pass judgment. Mancini did not prophesy; he read rhythm. And rhythm never lies. The rhythm here is: Vietnamese sport operates with two overlapping reward tiers, and the local tier increasingly outweighs the state tier. Hanoi is a large municipality with revenue and spending power. Other provinces are not. This means an athlete's future depends more and more on where they were born or drafted onto a payroll. That is a form of regional inequality encoded in policy, existing legally and openly, but rarely discussed. There is another aspect to read carefully. The special preferential stipends are calculated 'until the next Games'. This is a long period, about four years. Over four years, much can change: local budgets can be cut, policies can be amended, the Games cycle can shift for force-majeure reasons like a pandemic. So what is called 'nearly four billion dong' is in fact a commitment spread over time, and its true value depends on whether the commitments are honoured on schedule. This is a risk rarely raised when the media report big numbers. I have seen this in football, when a transfer is announced with a sky-high figure, but the instalments stretched over years depend on countless conditions. A transfer is not money; it is how people say goodbye. And here, the reward is the same — not a simple lump sum, but a promise paid in instalments along the rhythm of the sport. There is a habit I have taught myself over many years: never look only at the dry statistics table. A table does not breathe. It does not tell you the rhythm of the match, the moment an athlete begins to lose composure, the moment a team collapses. Numbers are only traces. Rhythm is the truth. Applying that principle to the reward story, I see a clear rhythm: Vietnam's reward regime runs on a 'hot bonus plus long-term stipend' model. This model makes sense. The hot bonus addresses immediate need and carries symbolic weight — it tells the athlete: you have just done something huge, here is a reward now. The long-term stipend addresses sustainable need and retention — it tells the athlete: train with peace of mind, we will look after you until the next Games. This combination is a smart incentive design, because it touches both short-term motivation and long-term attachment. But the rhythm also reveals a weakness. The long-term stipend is tied to the Games cycle, meaning that after one cycle ends, the athlete must enter a new cycle under pressure to repeat the achievement to sustain the income stream. For a sepak takraw athlete past thirty, this is enormous pressure. Sepak takraw demands flexibility, sharpness and above all joint control. Age spares no one. So although the reward is designed to stabilise life, it is also a countdown clock. The athlete knows that after each cycle, without a new result, the income stream stops. This is when I remember what I recorded during those quiet months. In 2026, when every stadium closed and tournaments were postponed indefinitely, I lost my live-commentary contracts and sank into a quiet period. For three months, I stayed in my room, re-watching old matches, filling hundreds of handwritten pages about players' positional changes. Those three months saved no season — but they saved my memory. And from those notes, I learned: when you are stripped of spectators, you begin to hear what the noise once covered. Likewise, when you strip away the glittering numbers of a reward, you begin to see its true structure. What is the true structure here? A system in which the state plays the role of guaranteeing the foundation, while the locality plays the role of creating difference. And that difference can be huge. In Hanoi, the municipal stipend of 33.5 million dong a month is even higher than the state stipend of 20 million dong. In other words, for a Hanoi athlete, the city contributes more than the nation. This is a thought-provoking reality about how high-performance sport is organised in Vietnam. I have a strange habit: I like to place seemingly unrelated things side by side. A drop shot next to a historical memory. A referee's decision next to a philosophy of life. And here, I want to place two sporting worlds side by side: sepak takraw in Vietnam, where athletes live on state budget and reward policy, and global professional sports, where athletes live on the market. These two worlds run on different logics. In the market world, an athlete's value is set by spectators, television rights and sponsorship. In the budget world, an athlete's value is set by achievement and policy. Both have strengths and weaknesses. The market world can lift an athlete to peak income, but can also abandon them when form declines. The budget world guarantees a certain standard of living, but its ceiling is limited by public spending, and it depends on political and administrative cycles. Vietnam stands at the intersection of these two worlds. In sports like football, the market has developed enough to create a second income tier. In sports like sepak takraw, the market barely exists, and athletes' entire livelihood depends on budget and policy. This means that when we celebrate a sepak takraw gold, we are not only celebrating a sporting victory. We are celebrating a management model. And that model deserves serious examination, not just rosy numbers. I often think about young athletes. There is one thing I always believe: every shock comes from a child we failed to notice. In sepak takraw, that child may be a girl in a small province, training in a bare arena, with no sponsorship, no press following her, only a dream and a ticket onto a sports payroll. If she reads about this two-tier reward structure, she will understand that her path is harder than a colleague's in Hanoi. But she will also understand that a gold can change her life. Perhaps that paradox is what keeps her training every day. When a gold is awarded, there is a moment of silence before the stands erupt. In that moment, athletes usually do not think about money. They think of early-morning training, bruises on the instep, near-quittings. Money comes later. Glory comes first. And that is the correct order of sport. But as a writer, I have a duty to look at what comes later, because what comes later decides whether another child will dare to walk this path. Sport does not live on inspiration alone. It lives on concrete material conditions: a training ground, a coach, a stipend sufficient for peace of mind, a future not too precarious. If we speak only of glory and not of these conditions, we tell half the story. The report on the sepak takraw gold told us the figure of nearly four billion dong from state sources for three athletes. That is a beautiful number. But read closely, and the real story lies in the layers below: a municipal stipend larger than the national one, a gap between teammates in the same team, the extension of rewards over a four-year cycle, and rewards from federation and sponsors still open. These are details only those who read slowly will notice. I have been wrong before, trusting beautiful theories over reality. In 2026, I placed full faith in two teams I idealised, and both were eliminated in the group stage. I was so shocked I stopped writing for a week. Then I wrote a piece admitting I was wrong, and it was shared more than any tactical analysis I had ever written. Since then, I have learned that truth lies not in glittering surfaces, but in concrete details we have the courage to look at. With this sepak takraw gold, the concrete truth is: this is a sporting achievement worthy of pride, rewarded by a reward system with a complex structure, running on two tiers, with points left unsaid. That is not something sad. It is simply something worth understanding better. In sport, people often confuse healthy scepticism with criticism. Healthy scepticism is reading closely, asking questions, seeking evidence. Criticism is judging without understanding. I pursue healthy scepticism. When I look at the two-tier reward structure, I do not want to say it is wrong. I want to say it needs to be understood correctly, because only then can we improve it. There is one thing I am sure of: if other provinces and cities look at Hanoi's model and copy it, Vietnamese sport will see a race to raise reward levels between localities. That may be good news for athletes in wealthy localities, but bad news for athletes in poor ones. Without an equalisation mechanism, the regional gap in high-performance sport will become clearer. And that, in turn, will affect the human resources of sports less commercialised than football. But I do not want to dramatise everything either. There is a bright point in this story: the fact that coaches receive 50% of an athlete's entitlement shows the system recognises the teacher's role. And the existence of both a hot bonus and a long-term stipend shows the system has thought about both immediate and long-term needs. These are signs of a sport system maturing, though much work remains. I remember a line I once wrote: two hundred pages of notes saved no season, but they saved memory. In this case, I have no two hundred pages of sepak takraw notes. I have only one article and sixteen information points. But read slowly enough, carefully enough, those sixteen points can also save one truth: that behind every gold lies a structure, and behind every structure lie specific people with specific lives. From here, there are signals I will keep watching. First, whether the federation and sponsor rewards — not included in the published figure — will be disclosed clearly. If they exceed the state amount, the athlete's financial picture changes significantly. Second, whether other provinces and cities issue reward policies similar to Hanoi's. If so, the map of sports talent allocation will shift. Third, whether reward and stipend levels are adjusted for inflation, because a fixed stipend over four years can lose real value if living costs rise. And finally, there is a question I want every reader to answer for themselves: if you were the third athlete in that gold team — unnamed, potentially receiving less than teammates for payroll reasons — what would you think on medal day? Would you think of glory, or of fairness? And should sport, the thing we love with all our hearts, be a place where two people do the same job, achieve the same result, but receive two different rewards simply because they registered in two different places? I do not have a complete answer. And perhaps it is precisely because there is no complete answer that sport remains an unfinished story. What I know is: every time a gold is awarded, a new heartbeat begins in the system. The task of a writer like me is not to congratulate and then forget. My task is to listen to that heartbeat until it becomes part of collective memory — a memory that records not only glory, but also how we treated those who brought that glory home. Every shock comes from a child we failed to notice. But also, all fairness begins with our willingness to notice those on the margins. And in this sepak takraw story, the person on the margin is the unnamed athlete — who contributed a third of the gold, but may receive only half the reward. For her, and for all like her, I write this piece. Not to conclude, but to open a question our sport system must answer in the next cycle. When the arena is empty, I hear the breathing of the match more clearly. And in that breathing, I also hear the sound of things left unsaid. That is where sport truly begins — not on the medal table, but in the silences between the numbers.