Vietnam’s wushu taolu through the 5–3–2 score sheet: blaming the judges, overlooking Panel A

At the women’s jianshu – qiangshu all-around at SEA Games 31 on home soil in Hanoi, a Vietnamese athlete sank into the closing stance of her spear routine, the tip angled down to the floor exactly one beat before the music stopped. The crowd applauded before the scoreboard lit up. I was in the seventh row, close enough to see her shoulders lift as the announcer read the marks: A 4.90 – B 2.75 – C 1.85, total 9.50. Most of the hall nodded along. The gap to the leader was not in the hardest jump of the routine. It sat in Panel B, where three judges had to decide whether a spear form carried “spirit.”

That pause after the music stopped is what I kept coming back to over the following two years.

Three panels, three different natures

The taolu score sheet is divided into three parts. Panel A, quality of movement, is worth up to 5.00 and is marked on specific technical faults: staggered footwork, loss of balance, a wrong thrust angle on the spear, a landing in the wrong stance. Panel B, overall performance, is worth up to 3.00 and is marked on rhythm, power, tension and expression. Panel C, difficulty, known as nandu, is worth up to 2.00 and is credited from the difficulty list registered before the routine begins. This 5–3–2 split is the taolu judging standard of the International Wushu Federation (IWUF), applied uniformly at continental and world championships.

Those three panels are not the same kind of thing. A and C are data zones: which fault costs how much, how many points a difficulty element is worth, all of it tabulated. B is a zone of perception.

On the international stage, Southeast Asian teams are routinely described as weak on difficulty. That description is half right. For Vietnamese wushu taolu, the generation of Duong Thuy Vi and Hoang Thi Phuong Giang lived on clean fundamentals and steady rhythm, not on the number of aerial rotations. Their spear and sword forms held the top tier of the continent because the transitions between two techniques almost never dropped.

Then the rules changed. The nandu list expanded, and 720-degree twists became the norm in the optional routine category. Panel C was pushed up into the main battlefield, and the pressure shifted toward teams with height, spring and youth. Vietnam did not choose that race. Vietnam was pulled into it.

The leak is in Panel A

Based on my experience watching taolu competitions in person across several SEA Games and continental championships, the leak in Vietnamese athletes’ scores in recent years sits in Panel A far more than in Panel B.

Take a typical women’s optional routine that I timed from my seat: the athlete registered four nandu elements. The first, a 360-degree jump landing in a middle stance, was clean. The second, a straight jump kick landing in a bow stance, was downgraded one level because the rear foot rotated slightly. The third, a 720-degree twist, was completed but touched down on the ball of the foot. The fourth, a balance transfer, missed by half a beat, right as the closing section began.

My notebook recorded two things. One, Panel A losses accumulate from four to six minor faults, worth 0.3 to 0.5 points — enough to drop a medal placing. Two, three of those four faults appeared after the first minute of the routine, once the breathing had changed rhythm.

It is the same phenomenon: late in the routine the body fades, the legs control less, the landings miss more. Panel B does not deduct for fatigue. Panel A does. Late faults are charged directly against quality of movement, and no judge has the discretion to wave them away.

For athletes in medal contention, Panel B scores among leading teams cluster between 2.70 and 2.85. The variance between B judges is very hard to make up by rehearsing expression. The ceiling of a routine is set by A plus C, not by aesthetics.

That is why I argue the Vietnamese taolu problem is less artistic than people assume. It is closer to a problem of distributing stamina. Place the 720-degree twist in the second section, accept losing some speed, and the closing section keeps its legs. Place it in the third section, bank the points early, and pay for it in the last stretch with three minor faults — the net return can be negative.

People chase medals; I chase the techniques that get forgotten: the balance transfer that misses by half a beat, the small knee dip before the decisive strike, the shift in breathing between two halves of a form. None of that shows up on the score sheet, yet all of it builds the score sheet.

Conditions under which I could be wrong

I do not have a wide enough dataset to declare which nandu placement is optimal. The fault counts in my notebook are on-site observation, not the official judges’ protocol. If a team can keep both the 720-degree twist and a clean closing section, the entire argument above collapses, and I will be the first to write that down.

The misunderstanding from outside

The popular explanation after every major Games: taolu is judged on feeling, Vietnam is beautiful but gets cheated because officials favour the sport’s parent nation. That explanation is partly right when applied to Panel B, and meaningless when applied to Panel A.

Panel A keeps a protocol: which fault, how much deducted, all written down. It is the most transparent part of a sport with a reputation for murk. Read that protocol and the name sits in the deduction column, not the favouritism column. When every defeat is attributed to Panel B, nobody goes back to check the deductions in Panel A.

I trusted the mathematics before I trusted the arena; that was my most expensive mistake. In Russia in 2026 I calculated from running legs and forgot the intent of the man striking the ball. In taolu the same trap takes an inverted shape: I calculate difficulty and forget that difficulty is only paid out if the landing is in the correct stance.

The next signal

What matters at the coming championships is not whether a Vietnamese athlete can throw a 720-degree twist, but where the nandu is placed in the routine and how many faults appear in the final thirty seconds. That stretch is now where medals are kept or dropped. Between two strikes there is a pause that holds the whole truth.

Old files gather dust, but the kick from that year still curves through the data. To know who will stand on the podium at the next Games, read what the judges write in Panel A before you listen to the applause.