Vietnamese Women's Sepak Takraw and the ASIAD Gold: Inside the Two-Tier Reward Structure

The rattan ball rolled off the bare instep, slipped through the gap between two defenders, and touched down in the opponent's court. The whistle blew. The Nagoya stands erupted into a roar. Three Vietnamese women froze for a beat, as if their bodies needed one more second to believe what their minds already knew.

That was the moment the ASIAD gold medal belonged to them. Every camera turned that way. Every newsroom wanted to publish that moment.

But there was another moment, quieter, which I think is the most interesting part of this story: the moment an official opened a spreadsheet and began to add. Because in Vietnam, an ASIAD gold medal is a financial event, a policy event, and sometimes a moral event.

I have followed women's sport for nearly two decades, from women's football on grass pitches to indoor sepak takraw courts. What I have learned is this: how a nation pays its female athletes says more about that nation than any medal table ever could.

A sport that has never been told properly

Sepak takraw, known in Vietnam as cầu mây, is a sport Vietnamese people consider their own, yet the world files it under Southeast Asian disciplines that global media rarely notices. The rules are peculiar: players may only use their feet, knees, shoulders and head to send a ball woven from rattan or plastic over a net roughly 1.52 metres high. No hands. No letting the ball touch the ground on your side. It demands extraordinary flexibility, a balance close to that of a circus artist, and a reading of the ball's flight that few outsiders can imagine.

Across Southeast Asia, sepak takraw carries a long tradition. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and Laos each have their own schools and generations. Continental events, especially the Asian Games, are where these nations meet. For Vietnam, women's sepak takraw is one of the rare disciplines where we can compete at the very top of the continent.

Yet sepak takraw sits in a strange position inside Vietnam's sports system. It does not attract the media pull of football. It has no professional league like basketball. It lacks the fervent fan base that women's volleyball has built in recent years. Which means that when women's sepak takraw athletes win, they are usually known through short bulletins, scrolling television text, and a handful of photographs.

Based on my experience watching sepak takraw matches, I can say this is the sport where the gap between real competitive value and recognised value is widest. A heel save in a split second, a curled kick over the shoulder, a three-player combination that fails if it is half a second late — none of that appears in reward bulletins. Those bulletins care about one thing: how much money.

Two tiers of reward: a structure few people see

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because it holds what Vietnamese media almost never analyses: the two-tier architecture of the reward system.

The first tier is the state. Under Government Decree No. 349/2026/NĐ-CP, an athlete who wins an ASIAD gold receives 280 million VND. But that is only the visible part. What fewer people know is that beyond the one-off bonus, athletes also receive a so-called special allowance of 20 million VND per person per month, running from the result until the next Games. With an ASIAD cycle of roughly 48 months, that allowance is worth 960 million VND.

Added together, each athlete receives about 1.24 billion VND from the state budget. Multiplied by three, the state's total for the team is nearly 3.72 billion VND — the figure the press usually calls nearly 4 billion VND.

The second tier is local. And this is where the difference emerges. Under Resolution No. 82/2026/NQ-HĐND of the Hanoi People's Council, the two athletes on the Hanoi payroll receive an extra 140 million VND each, plus a special allowance of 33.5 million VND per month, again over 48 months. That allowance is worth 1.608 billion VND. With the 140 million VND, each Hanoi athlete draws roughly 1.748 billion VND more from the capital's budget.

In total, an athlete on the Hanoi payroll can receive close to 3 billion VND for a single gold medal. An athlete outside Hanoi receives about 1.24 billion VND.

This is the point I want to stress, and I will say it plainly: within a single gold medal, some athletes receive double what their teammates receive — not because they played better, but because they were born in the right province with a more generous reward policy.

I am not saying this to criticise Hanoi. A locality that actively cares for its athletes deserves credit, and it reflects a reality: Vietnam's sports system runs on a model where the locality that pays more attention gives its athletes more. But looking at the whole picture, we must admit this is a real inequality.

And here the story grows more complicated. Three people stood on the podium. Three heard the national anthem. Three shared a moment they will likely remember for life. But when they went home, two opened their bank accounts and saw one figure. The third opened hers and saw a figure less than half as large.

There are stars that need no stage lights; they light themselves out of the darkness. But even stars that light themselves deserve fair treatment once the lights have gone out.

The rewards the spreadsheet does not show

The story does not end there. Beyond the state and local tiers, there are other sums that media mention but rarely quantify.

First, a hot bonus of 200 million VND from the delegation. This is cash handed over on the spot, usually to lift athletes' spirits right after competition. It sits outside all the sums above, and it is not split as evenly as we might assume.

Second, rewards from the federation and sponsors. This is the murkiest part of the picture. No specific figure is published, and that creates a worrying information gap. In Vietnamese sport, sponsor rewards can exceed state rewards — or fall far below. It depends on how commercialised the sport is, and as I said, sepak takraw is not a highly commercial discipline.

Notably, the coach also has a share. Under the rules, coach Hoang Thi Thai Xuan receives 50 per cent of one athlete's entitlement. This is a governance detail rarely itemised in the press, and it shows Vietnam's sports system has a mechanism tying a coach's interests to their athletes' results.

Added together, we get an almost complete picture: state and Hanoi budgets, plus the hot bonus, plus the unspecified federation and sponsor rewards. The real total may far exceed the nearly 4 billion VND the bulletins mention.

But I do not want to stop at counting money. What I want readers to see is this: behind every figure is a policy decision, and behind every policy decision is a conception of the value of women's sport.

A contrarian angle: nearly 4 billion VND and what it hides

Now I will say what I consider most important in this article.

The nearly 4 billion VND figure in the press is technically correct, but it is a selective figure. It counts only the state budget for three athletes. It excludes the Hanoi portion, the hot bonus, and the federation and sponsor rewards. It unintentionally creates the impression that all three athletes received the same.

They did not. And the gap between them is not a minor detail. It is a structural feature of the system.

The second thing the figure hides is its dependence on the cycle. The special allowances of 20 million VND and 33.5 million VND per month are calculated over the interval until the next Games. That means the real value of the gold depends on the continental calendar, not on a fixed sum. If the cycle shortens, or if policy changes, the money can be far less than expected.

The third, and perhaps what troubles me most, is the claim that this is a historic gold. I believe it may be true. But in the material I have, there is no information about opponents, field size, the final score, or the team's path through the rounds. In other words, we know the result but not the story behind it. And when we call an achievement historic without comparative context, we are doing what analysts call placing the conclusion before the evidence.

Price reflects the market, but dignity reflects the person. And the dignity of a gold medal lies not in the money it brings, but in whether we tell its story truthfully.

I want to add one point about gender. Women's sepak takraw receives far less reward than men's football, men's basketball, or even women's football at certain moments. This reflects a broader reality: the market value of women's sport remains undervalued, and our reward system mirrors that valuation instead of correcting it.

But there is a paradox worth pondering. While men's sports can rely on broadcast rights, sponsorship and transfer fees for income, women's sports like sepak takraw depend almost entirely on the state budget and local reward policies. For women's sport, state policy is not merely a supplement. It is the entire lifeline.

And that means: when we talk about gender inequality in sport, we are not only talking about prize money. We are talking about the whole structure of opportunity.

Why this matters more than a reward bulletin

I want to tell a small story from my own experience. Years ago, I followed a young female athlete in a little-known sport. She trained every day, competed every season, and each time she won, her family had to wait months to receive the reward that had been promised. Not because anyone intended to cheat them. But because of administrative process, because budgets are allocated by cycle, because there are too many layers between a decision and a disbursement.

That taught me: a reward announced in the press is not the same as money arriving in an account. And for female athletes, who often lack income from personal sponsorship deals, the distance between those two things can be their entire life.

That is why I believe the story of the women's sepak takraw ASIAD gold matters more than an ordinary reward bulletin. It is a window into how Vietnam's sports system operates: who benefits, who does not, on what criteria, and for how long.

It is also a window into how we tell the story of women's sport. When a female athlete wins, we praise spirit, resilience, sacrifice. But we rarely analyse the material structure that enabled or obstructed the achievement. We rarely ask: is she paid fairly? Does she get the same support system as her male colleagues? Can she make a living from this?

They do not run for titles; they run so the next generation will not have to run as they did. I believe the three women on the podium in Nagoya thought the same. They did not compete only for a gold medal. They competed to prove that a little-known sport, dominated by Southeast Asian women, still deserves a place on the continental sporting map.

But for that proof to matter in the long run, it must be accompanied by a system of fair treatment.

An unfinished manuscript

Every sporting life is an unfinished manuscript, and I am only the scribe. I write these lines not to judge anyone. I write to record a moment I believe is important: the moment a nation decided that the women kicking a rattan ball over a 1.52-metre net deserved to be paid.

But I also write to offer a progressive thought: if we have decided that women's sport deserves investment, then we must make that investment fairer, more transparent, and less dependent on where an athlete happens to be registered.

Those three women did what very few Vietnamese have done: they stood at the top of Asia in their sport. What they need now is not more applause. What they need is a system in which their achievement is recognised the same way, no matter where they come from.

And if the next generation of women's sepak takraw athletes can walk onto the court without worrying whether their reward will be disbursed on time, that would be the most valuable gold medal we could ever give them.