The Empty Analysis and the 47 Forgotten Strides on the Track

I have run hurdles all my life, only never been timed. This is why an empty spreadsheet does not frighten me. I keep returning to a frame from SEA Games 29: Nguyen Thi Oanh's spikes hitting the track during the final lap of the women's 3,000m steeplechase. I counted 47 stride cycles per minute as she accelerated into the last curve. I trust footage more than words, because footage cannot lie. That rhythm told me something the official report left out: a woman using technique to reject a stereotype.

The editors once handed me a sports analysis with eight sections all marked “N/A – insufficient information”. No technique, no rivals, no tournament system, no risks, no public narrative. Others would call it a failed draft. I called it a confession.

At SEA Games 29 in Kuala Lumpur, Nguyen Thi Oanh won three gold medals in five days: 1,500m, 5,000m and 3,000m steeplechase. Her results should have opened a technical debate about energy distribution, recovery cycles and hurdle-step selection. Instead, when I proposed that angle for a documentary, I was told: “What does a woman know about running? Just write with emotion.”

My answer was to sit alone with the footage and log her stride frequency, step length and landing point after every barrier. No sports desk requested that work. But when the film was finished, the most discussed segment was the two-minute technical breakdown built from those “useless” details. That sequence saved the film at the box office.

In 2026, with stadiums empty, I turned shoe spikes into a film's heartbeat. The women's football team of Ha Nam lost its sponsor but still trained in an old gymnasium. I placed a phone on the wooden floor and recorded the whole practice. Eleven players formed a drumbeat absent from every match report.

I met the same invisible hurdle while writing about Quach Thi Lan at the Tokyo Olympics. She reached the 400m hurdles semi-final in 55.71 seconds, a first for Vietnamese athletics. During the interview, she recalled a sentence once heard at a training centre: “Girls who hurdle will ruin their legs and cannot start a family.” I did not turn that sentence into melodrama. I placed it beside the 55.71-second data point and asked: how many female technicians have we lost because of a sentence like that?

An empty analysis is also a piece of data. It reveals where the power structure points its cameras. If every metrics table is aimed at men's football or elite chess while women's running is described only with adjectives, the data gap will keep producing inequality. What matters is placing the same technical ruler on the same track.

I also distrust my own reverse reflex. If I rejected every male-created dataset simply because of its origin, I would trade one bias for another. Verification must apply to the arguments I love most. That is why I keep asking: what is this data actually saying against what I want to hear? Hurdling taught me that if I only stare at the barrier in front of me, I lose the rhythm of my own stride.

An empty analysis becomes valuable the moment we fill it with women's names. Start with Nguyen Thi Oanh, Quach Thi Lan and the eleven players of Ha Nam. Do not ask if they look beautiful while running; ask where they land on the foot after the hurdle. Do not ask if they deserve sponsorship; ask why the system has not recorded their weekly hurdle repetitions. Sport is the only common language when two strangers wait for the starting gun. That gun fires fairly only when every lane has its own stopwatch.