Two Bronzes at Asiad 20: Teqball Writes the First Page, Karate Keeps the Old Rhythm

The bronze medal match in the mixed doubles ended faster than I expected. Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan and Trinh Gia Nghi beat the Indian pair of Dsouza Quimcy Joaquim and Beg Mohamed Anas Imran 2-0, and the applause in the small arena was quiet enough that I could hear the ball bounce off the curved table. I was sitting in the fourth row with my notebook open, ready to record the decisive rally, only to realise I had missed it; the ball travelled from Minh Tan's foot to Gia Nghi's head in less than a breath. A stadium so quiet that I could hear the match itself breathing. The first bronze medal for Vietnam's delegation at Asiad 20 came from a court most domestic spectators have never seen: Teqball.

Teqball is a sport that combines elements of football and table tennis, played on a curved table that dips in the middle. Athletes may only touch the ball with their feet, thighs, chest or head. Each side gets a maximum of three touches before sending the ball over the net, and no one may touch the ball twice in a row. In doubles, that rule turns every rally into a coordination problem: the first player touches to keep the ball alive, the second touches to finish. Miss one beat and the ball drops to the floor or flies out of bounds.

Teqball appeared on the official competition programme at Asiad 20 for the first time. For a sport this young, the gap between delegations lies in hours of combined practice rather than in physical foundations. Countries that brought Teqball into their training systems early hold a clear advantage, because the sport demands reflexes, ball feel and the ability to read a partner's intent, three things that cannot be learned in a few months.

In Vietnam, Teqball is still fairly new. The fact that Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan and Trinh Gia Nghi made an immediate mark on the continental stage therefore means something different from an ordinary medal: this group of athletes already has enough individual technical grounding to compensate for the shortage of shared training time.

Shortly afterwards, Vietnam's Teqball team missed the chance to add another medal. Ba Truong Giang and Le Anh Khoa lost to the Iraqi pair in the men's doubles bronze medal match on the morning of September 20. On that same morning, in Karate, Bui Ngoc Nhi brought Vietnam's delegation another bronze in the women's individual kata event.

In the mixed doubles bronze medal match, the notable thing was not the 2-0 scoreline but the way Minh Tan and Gia Nghi divided their roles. In Teqball mixed doubles, the rules create no gender difference, but reach and height of contact point do. The player with the longer reach is usually assigned to block in the middle of the table, where the surface dips and the ball's trajectory becomes hardest to predict. The other player holds the outer lane, where the ball travels straight and needs one finishing touch.

Watching the footage again afterwards, I saw a fairly clear repeated pattern. Gia Nghi received the ball in the middle, held it with chest or thigh, and slowed the rhythm; Minh Tan moved to the left corner and waited for the third touch. The Indian pair read the pattern but had no alternative: they struck the ball along fixed lines and revealed their trajectory too early. In a sport where every rally lasts only a few seconds, revealing your trajectory early is equivalent to handing your opponent the point.

What sets the Vietnamese pair apart is the ability to change rhythm rather than raw speed. They did not play fast from the start. They kept the ball, dragged the opponents out of position, and only then delivered the decisive touch. This style demands patience and a very good base of ball feel; it is like a table tennis brain set on football legs.

In the men's doubles, Ba Truong Giang and Le Anh Khoa showed a different face. They entered with a faster rhythm, choosing to impose themselves from the very first touches. The Iraqi pair did not fight that rhythm; they waited. As the match stretched on, the opponents' patience turned into an advantage, and the two Vietnamese athletes paid for it with the energy they had already spent early on.

Turning to Karate, Bui Ngoc Nhi's case is a different lesson. She lost to host athlete Ono Maho of Japan 0-5 in her opening bout. She then beat Choi Haeun of South Korea 5-0 and Leong Wai Yee Shannon of Singapore 4-1 to take bronze.

In competitive kata, the score is split into two parts: technical quality and performance quality. A kata loses points when movements lack decisiveness, when balance is lost, or when breathing falls out of rhythm. Losing 0-5 and then winning 5-0 on the same day says something the scoreboard cannot: the capacity to recover mentally is faster than the capacity to recover technically. In karate, the gap between a maximum-scoring kata and a heavily penalised one often comes down to two or three moments of lost balance.

I have followed Ngoc Nhi since SEA Games 33 and the Asian junior events. What stands out in her journey is her consistency across consecutive tournaments rather than a single breakout. At Asiad 20, she still has a chance at another medal as she and her teammates enter the women's team kata quarter-finals against Nepal on September 22.

After nearly half a day of competition, China's delegation 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 at Asiad 20. Host nation Japan sat second with 2 golds and 3 bronzes. Macao, South Korea and Kazakhstan each had 1 gold, ranked third through fifth. Vietnam's delegation placed ninth with 2 bronzes.

The most comfortable reading of these two bronzes is to treat them as proof that Vietnamese sport is spreading into new disciplines. That reading is not wrong, but it hides a more uncomfortable point. The two medals came from two opposite structures: one sport where global talent depth is still thin, and one where depth is dense. In Teqball, most continental delegations are still in an experimental phase, so a group with solid technical grounding can advance quickly. In Karate, by contrast, every medal must pass through dozens of opponents trained systematically from childhood.

What is concerning is that in both cases, the trace of a grassroots coaching system is faint. The Teqball bronze rests on the individual foundations of a few athletes. The Karate bronze rests on one fighter's mental recovery. Both are beautiful, both are deserved, but both are fragile without a layer of properly trained grassroots coaches behind them. After many years of watching, I still hold the same view: investing in grassroots coaches matters more than opening more centres named after former stars.

There is one more point about the schedule. Ngoc Nhi had to compete in individual kata and prepare for the team kata quarter-finals only two days later. In sports demanding high precision, such a short rest window creates two kinds of pressure: physical and mental. An athlete who loses 0-5 and must return to the mat the same day can do it, but the price usually shows up weeks later, when the tournament is over and no one is looking at the scoreboard any more.

Teqball at Asiad 20 showed me something simple: when a new sport enters the continental stage, people do not compete with history but with hours of practice. Minh Tan and Gia Nghi taking bronze on their first appearance is a good signal, but a good signal only has value if it is read correctly. The question I carried away from that arena centres on one thing only: do we have enough people to teach this sport to the next generation.