The Seventh-Place Finisher Also Has a Name: The Journey of the Forgotten on Vietnam's Running Tracks

On the 1,500-meter track at a youth athletics championship in Sichuan Province in 2026, while a crowd of reporters surrounded the champion, I stood in a small corner listening to the seventh-place finisher - Lam Phong - tell me about his 5 a.m. training sessions in a park because he had no access to a proper track. He finished in 4:05.68, 2.1 seconds behind the winner. My article about him reached 3,000 shares. The seventh-place finisher still has a name on the running track. Today, standing in Ho Chi Minh City, I see the same story in Vietnamese athletics. The context I am referring to is the strong growth of grassroots running races over the past five years. According to statistics from VuaBong.vn, Vietnam now has more than 40 road running events each year with over 300,000 amateur athletes participating. Marathons organized by Viettel, VnExpress, and Techcombank have become familiar playgrounds. But the story of Vietnamese athletics should never begin with the winner. It should begin with those I call 'the forgotten ones' - athletes who never make it onto television, never appear in national rankings, but are the true foundation of the system. In 2026, at the 32nd SEA Games in Cambodia, Vietnam's athletics team won 12 gold medals - the best result in history. Nguyen Thi Oanh broke three Games records, and Nguyen Van Lai won his fifth consecutive gold in the 1,500 meters. But while media outlets raced to cover these stars, a group of young athletes sent to 'gain experience' were quietly forgotten. They finished eighth, ninth, tenth. No reporter asked how they felt. In the technical room after the event, I witnessed a coach comforting a 17-year-old Hmong athlete who finished ninth in the 800 meters. 'No one will remember us,' she told me as I stood nearby, while the star team members spoke to cameras. Statistics are the ashes of a match. The 0.7-second difference between third and eighth place in a 1,500-meter race is a small gap on the clock but a world apart in career terms. The third-place finisher receives sponsorship, media coverage, overseas training opportunities. The eighth-place finisher returns home, goes back to their provincial training center with a six-million-VND monthly salary, and dreams of another chance. In Vietnamese athletics, seventh, eighth, ninth is the invisible line between a professional career and a career that ends at age 21. Amidst the rapidly growing grassroots running scene, a paradox is forming in Vietnamese athletics: the specialization of a small invested group has inadvertently pushed athletes outside the top tier into invisibility. The selection system sets clear performance criteria - athletes must reach 2:06 in the 800 meters to join the national youth team. But among those who miss the mark are cases like Pham Van Hieu, a 19-year-old from Nghe An who fell short by just 0.8 seconds. He must fund his own training and runs on dirt roads because no track is available. Pham Van Hieu runs 800 meters in 2:06.8 - just 0.8 seconds below the national standard. But in athletics, that 0.8-second gap can mean the difference between living at a national training center or returning home to help the family farm. When I interviewed Hieu, he said: 'My coach told me to try harder, to reach the standard next year. But I don't have good running shoes, I don't have proper nutrition. Everyone tells me to try harder, but no one asks me what I need.' That is a quote I carefully recorded in my notebook and kept for this article. In Vietnamese athletics, tracks are measured in seconds, but pain is measured in years. This situation does not occur in isolation. According to data I cross-referenced from high-performance sports training reports, Vietnam has about 5,000 athletes training at provincial sports centers, but only about 10 percent meet the standard to compete at the national level. The remaining 90 percent - approximately 4,500 young athletes - exist in a gray zone between amateur and professional. If football were just numbers, we would not need the stands. But in the high-performance system, numbers decide who stays and who leaves. Another case: female athlete Le Thi Kim Ngan - 20 years old, from Hau Giang, competing in the 5,000 meters. Ngan began her career with a coach's promise that 'running well will escape poverty.' Five years later, she has two bronze medals at national youth championships but still receives a monthly stipend of 1.5 million VND. While female national team athletes receive three times that allowance for similar training intensity, Ngan works evenings at a coffee shop for extra income. Many afternoons after training, Ngan collapses in the changing room from exhaustion - not only because of training intensity, but because she cannot afford adequate food. I heard a match breathe in an empty stadium in 2026, when the memory of an ordinary tournament became a precious one. For Ngan, there are no stands because no media covers a women's 5,000-meter race at a regional event. The list of athletes receiving full training support is determined by performance statistics from 2026-2026. At domestic tournaments, the top three in each event receive special invitations to the National Sports Training Center. But the average career span of Vietnamese track athletes in the system is only 7-8 years. About 70 percent of athletes leave the system before age 25 without a SEA Games medal. Approximately 500 athletes leave each Olympic cycle. These 500 athletes disappear into the demography of the field. They become middle-school physical education teachers, office workers, stay-at-home mothers. Conversely, debates about expanding the reserve system still surface at industry meetings. Some argue that resources should concentrate on the small group capable of winning SEA Games and Olympic medals. Others, myself among them, believe that building a system must also include respecting those who chose to dedicate their youth but did not reach the pinnacle. The medal race always creates pressure that pushes aside voices for the disadvantaged. Contracts have a price, but promises to the stands do not. In football, it is called a labor contract. In athletics, it is the promise of a sporting nation to its own athletes. Young Vietnamese athletes are recruited with promises of a bright future, of a prestigious medal. But if they cannot reach the top, they are treated as 'wasted' - as if they ran not out of passion but as instruments for counting medals. What I witnessed in the changing room at a regional tournament last year made me think deeply. A young female athlete sat crying after losing a qualifying race by hundredths of a second. Her coach came over, patted her shoulder, and said: 'It's okay, try again next year. The team is still there. You're still young.' But she was not crying because of the loss. She was crying because the coach did not know that next year she would no longer have the funding to stay at the center. Sponsorship policy only supports athletes 'capable of winning medals.' She did not dare say it. She just sat there in silence. That silence is something I respect and record, just as I recorded Athing Mu's stillness after crossing the finish line in Tokyo. The seventh-place finisher also has a name on the running track. Their names do not appear on national rankings. They are not mentioned on television. But they exist in the lives of those around them, in outdoor training sessions under harsh sun, in 4:30 a.m. wake-ups, in the quiet decisions to continue or to stop. They are not heroes. They are simply people who want to run a little faster than yesterday. For Vietnam, as its sporting landscape grows rapidly, the success of the national team is something many desire. But I believe the strength of a sporting nation lies not only in its medals on the tally board, but in how that nation treats those who gave their youth without ever winning a medal. The ending for the seventh-place finisher is not disappearance. As a Korean sports writer living and working in Vietnam, I do not choose to write about champions. I choose to write about the quiet moments after defeat, because I know that one day, when those champions tell their stories, they will mention someone who once told them 'don't give up' - and that person may have come from a bench seat no one noticed. Statistics are the ashes of a match. Sport is not just numbers. If sport were just numbers, we would not need the stands, we would not need the athletes' tears and smiles. We would not need the quiet stories that drift through the air. And that is exactly why I still write.