Vietnam Women's Sepak Takraw at ASIAD 20: The Two-Tier Reward Behind the Gold

On the sepak takraw court in Nagoya, nobody wears shoes. Instep, heel, sole — three Vietnamese women keep the ball alive at a rhythm the eye struggles to follow. I once stood at the starting blocks of the 400m hurdles, where my hamstring tore at the seventh barrier at the 2026 East Java youth championships and I fell in front of a shouting crowd. Watching those three athletes step onto the ASIAD 20 podium, I remembered the line I wrote during recovery: injury took my legs and gave me back the word. Their legs are intact. But behind that gold medal sits a ledger few match-watchers ever see.

ASIAD 20 is being held in Nagoya, Japan. On 29 September, Vietnam's women's sepak takraw doubles team won gold. Three athletes, two of them on the Hanoi payroll — Nguyen Thi Thu Trang and Nguyen Thi Khanh Ly; the third is not named in the source I could access. Coach Hoang Thi Thai Xuan leads the team.

Sepak takraw is governed at continental level by ISTAF and ASTAF, contested under the Olympic Council of Asia umbrella — a different world from the BWF system I usually cover for the Indonesian market. The ball is struck over the net with the foot, knee and shoulder. No racket, no shuttlecock, no 52-week ranking table. Only body rhythm and precision.

I live in Surabaya, where sepak takraw appears in nearly every schoolyard and neighbourhood. Indonesians watch it with their eyes. I watch it with breath, and the breath of a sepak takraw match lives in the silence between two touches — where three athletes must synchronise within a fraction of a second. But the story I want to tell this time sits on a different stage: the reward schedule.

Vietnam's reward system runs in two tiers: a national tier under Decree 349/2026/ND-CP, and a municipal tier under Resolution 82/2026/NQ-HDND of the Hanoi People's Council. The first tier pays everyone; the second pays only those on the capital's payroll — and the gap between the two tiers matters more than the medal itself.

Take the numbers. Under Decree 349/2026/ND-CP, each ASIAD gold medallist receives 280 million dong in performance bonus. On top of that, a special preferential allowance for outstanding athletes is set at 20 million dong per month, running until the next ASIAD — roughly 48 months. Multiplied out, each athlete receives about 960 million dong from that stipend. In total, one athlete draws about 1.24 billion dong from the state budget. For a three-person team, the state figure is 3.72 billion dong — exactly the "nearly 4 billion" that headlines cite.

That is only the first tier.

Hanoi, under Resolution 82/2026/NQ-HDND, adds 140 million dong in bonus for each gold medallist. And adds 33.5 million dong per month for 48 months — about 1.608 billion dong. In total, a Hanoi-payroll athlete receives about 1.748 billion dong from the city. With two Hanoi athletes in the team, the municipal tier spends about 3.496 billion dong. Combined with those two athletes' national share — about 2.48 billion dong — the two Hanoi athletes receive roughly 5.98 billion dong. The third athlete, if not on the Hanoi payroll, receives only the national share.

The "nearly 4 billion" figure used in headlines reflects only the central-budget portion for the whole team; the real income of the two Hanoi-payroll athletes is about 2.4 times the national share they receive, and the gap with their third teammate is a crack inside the gold medal that has not been named.

There is one more layer. Coach Hoang Thi Thai Xuan is entitled to 50 percent of one athlete's share under the rules — about 0.62 billion dong from the state budget. The delegation also awarded a 200 million dong "hot bonus," which sits outside all figures above. And federation and sponsor rewards have not been published, nor counted. Counting only state and Hanoi budgets for three athletes and one coach, the total already exceeds 8 billion dong.

Tactics do not live on the whiteboard; they live between two ears. The same holds for a reward system: the mechanism is not the number in the headline, but the way the tiers are stacked and what they depend on.

The special stipend — the largest part of the package — is calculated to the next ASIAD, about 48 months. The real value of the gold therefore depends on the calendar, not on a fixed sum. If the cycle shifts, if budgets are revised, if the mechanism is amended before the next Games, that long-term income moves. Meanwhile the hot bonus and the federation and sponsor rewards — the money that can arrive early and is not cycle-dependent — remain unquantified.

One more point must be stated plainly: the source provides no final score, no field size, no opponent. The "historic" quality of the gold therefore cannot be verified from the competitive data in the source itself. That is a gap readers deserve to know about.

The quietest summer is the one that speaks the most. The months after a gold medal, once the stands fall silent, are when a reward system truly shows itself: who gets what, for how long, and on what terms. Journalism usually stops at the total. For anyone who studies high-performance sport, the question worth chasing is structural — one gold, three income levels and a 48-month window are three independent variables.

I no longer run, but I am still chasing something. To me, the sepak takraw gold of three Vietnamese women is more than a result. It is a window into how Vietnamese sport prices achievement, allocates resources, and — most importantly — treats the third person in a winning team. If the system rewards the athlete with a better local payroll more than the one without, the medal still shines, but that shine has a dark patch. And the writer's job, perhaps, is to keep that patch from being forgotten.