The Martial Arts Performance Scorecard: Recounting from Zero

On the electronic scoreboard at Quần Ngựa Sports Palace in Hanoi, a number appeared and then froze: 9.20. The male athlete had just finished his form, hands still folding into the closing position. The stands burst into noise. The man next to me — a coach who had followed the team for more than a decade — muttered something I could not catch, then bent down to write in his notebook. I sat in the seventh row, notebook in hand, with one question in my head: what exactly did the judges just award points for? I came to SEA Games 31 as a screenwriter for a short documentary about Vovinam. I thought I would bring back a few beautiful moments, a few kicks, a few collective shouts. What I brought back instead was a spreadsheet built by hand and a doubt that lasted for months. This was not the first time I left an arena feeling this way, but it was the first time I decided to sit down and count everything to the end. Vovinam was founded in Hanoi in 2026 by Nguyễn Lộc. By SEA Games 31 in 2026 it was a host sport, one of the disciplines Vietnam was most confident about, with both combat and performance events. But Vovinam has two very different halves, and those two halves speak two languages. One half is combat: two fighters on the mat, contact, falls, clear wins and losses in each round. Spectators can see for themselves who is better. The other half is performance: a single athlete alone, executing a patterned form, scored by a panel of judges. Spectators see nothing. They see an athlete moving beautifully, they see rhythm, they see power — but the number on the board sits outside their field of vision. That number is decided by five people seated below the mat. Each has a scale, a set of criteria, a way of converting movement into digits. That is why I started counting — not counting anything grand, but counting the smallest things that the scoreboard calls execution quality and then compresses into a single figure. In martial arts performance, a form is usually judged in three blocks. The first is technical difficulty — spinning kicks, jumps, falling techniques, each movement assigned a value in advance. The second is execution quality — balance, power, decisiveness, speed. The third is presentation — rhythm, expression, the connection between movement and breath. It sounds clear. But when I sat down and counted, I found that the third block can barely be separated from the second. An athlete performs the correct movement but lacks power — is that execution or presentation? An athlete holds perfect balance but shows no expression — is that technique or presence? The boundary between the three blocks is so fragile that each judge can shift it in their own way, and no one can call it an error. I took out my notebook and counted every routine. I recorded the duration of each movement, the number of times an athlete lost balance even slightly, the lag between the shout and the kick. I had no scoring machine; I had my eyes and a phone on slow motion. I counted 14 forms over three days, following the whole competition day, filling a spreadsheet nobody had asked me to make. What I found: the routines with the highest difficulty scores rarely earned the highest presentation scores, and vice versa. This is a familiar paradox in every judged sport — gymnastics, diving, figure skating. When difficulty is rewarded with points, athletes must choose between conquering difficulty and perfecting beauty. Often they cannot do both at once. But the story does not stop there. In many competitions, the list of difficult movements must be registered in advance. Athletes cannot improvise freely on the mat; they submit a plan, and the judges score whether they executed it correctly. This means the creative decision was made days earlier, on paper, not in the moment. When risk-taking becomes a checkbox on a registration form, it is no longer risk-taking. I have a specific example. A young athlete chose a routine with a difficulty coefficient far higher than his rivals. He executed the most beautiful spinning jump I had ever recorded — I slowed the footage enough to count individual frames, and he landed in near-perfect balance. But at the end, he finished half a beat early compared with the standard rhythm. Half a beat. On the scoreboard, that was deducted from the presentation block, and it was enough to push him below an athlete who chose an easier, safer routine but finished exactly on the beat. I sat with that number for a long time. Half a beat — too short for an ordinary spectator to notice. But enough to change the ranking. This is exactly where data analysis stands outside the door and is not allowed in. Machines cannot measure the tension of a kick, and judges cannot count to half a beat. People trust a number because it looks objective, but that number is born from human eyes. In many events, the highest and lowest scores are dropped to reduce personal bias. It sounds reasonable. But I counted, and I found that dropping two numbers rarely changes the ranking when the gap between athletes has already been set by the pre-registered difficulty coefficient. What is called fairness is only rounding off a conclusion that existed from the start. Paradox two: the scoring system rewards safety more than it rewards daring. A routine that never fails will always rank above a beautiful routine with one small flaw, because the deduction for an error always exceeds the bonus for difficulty. The result is that coaches teach their students to pick a routine within their ability, to pick the safe option, to finish on the beat rather than attempt the jump of a lifetime. Over time, the art is optimized for the scoreboard, not for itself. I once thought this was Vovinam's problem alone. Then I re-watched kata at the Tokyo 2026 Olympics, where karate was included in the official programme for the first time, contested at Nippon Budokan. Ryo Kiyuna won men's gold, Sandra Sánchez won women's gold, and Kiyou Shimizu — Japan's own, the home favourite — took silver. A result many viewers considered a surprise. What caught my attention was not the ranking, but how people argued about it. Nobody argued by counting. Everyone argued by feeling — Shimizu's form was more beautiful. That feeling may be correct, but it cannot be measured. And that is the root of every injustice in a judged sport: a system that demands objectivity while being operated by something that cannot be objective. Even a name like Damian Quintero, who competed in Tokyo that year, has publicly said many times that the feeling on the mat and the number on the board are two different languages. Paradox three: the home effect. I counted, and I found that in performance events, home athletes tend to receive slightly higher presentation scores than visiting athletes when two routines are technically comparable. I am not accusing anyone of cheating. I am only saying that judges are human, and people hear the roar of their own crowd, feel the pressure of a packed hall, and then score. This effect cannot be measured, cannot be verified, but it exists. So if I cannot prove it, why write it down? Because I learned the habit of verifying three sources after a small mistake years ago: I once misreported a track athlete's semifinal result by 0.2 seconds, and a single fan page exposed it. Since then, every number I use must have a source, or must be flagged as an estimate with context. My job is not to conclude. My job is to point out where data and the eye fail to meet, and let the reader answer for themselves. I count to know what I am doubting, not to know that I am right. This is the angle most sports analysis programmes skip. They chase the champion, chase the medals, chase the beautiful moment. They call a form perfect and then cite the organizers' number to prove it. I prefer to rebuild from scratch. I trust a person with a notebook counting by eye more than an unchecked summary. A number without a source is just a rumour in bold. Someone told me that digging into things like this spoils the joy of the art. I think the opposite. It is the refusal to look squarely at how we score that harms the art. A form was not taught to earn points. It was taught to tell a story about the body, about control, about a person teaching themselves to be silent and to move at the same time. When we turn it into a number, we do not make it bigger. We make it smaller. Combat does not have this problem. In combat, a fall is a point, and the whole hall sees it. That is why the strongest martial arts memories usually come from combat — not because it is more beautiful, but because it needs no interpreter. Performance always needs one, and every interpreter translates differently. I left SEA Games 31 with a full notebook, a few slow-motion clips, and a belief that the most beautiful things in martial arts always lie in the part that is not scored. That deducted half-beat is evidence of a person who dared to move faster than safety allows. I want to keep it in my film, not to cry over it, but to ask: if the scoreboard did not see it, and the audience did not see it, will anyone remember it ever existed? I counted every single play of Iceland by hand once, and suddenly saw a whole world — and here too, I counted every beat of the judges, and saw that the art does not live in the number. A single 0.2-second discrepancy taught me to trust my own eyes. Half a beat at Quần Ngựa Sports Palace taught me the same thing. My job is to find the piece the whole stadium forgot. Martial arts are not an exam. The body is a blackboard that no coach ever finishes reading. And if someone chooses the jump of a lifetime next time, I want them to know that out there, at least one person counted all the way to the final frame.