Asiad 20: Minh Tan - Gia Nghi open Vietnam's Teqball bronze account, Ngoc Nhi adds another in Kata

On the morning of September 20, at the Asiad 20 arena, when the last teqball dropped onto the curved table, Nguyen Hoang Minh Tan and Trinh Gia Nghi stood still for a few beats. No shouting. No wild celebration. Only the sound of the ball rolling on the floor and the heavy breathing of two young players who had just beaten India's Dsouza Quimcy Joaquim and Beg Mohamed Anas Imran 2-0. It was Vietnam's first bronze medal of Asiad 20.

I have sat through enough matches to know that first medals in a new sport always arrive quietly. Nobody has written its story yet. There is no historical record to compare against. No fan has memorised the names of the movements. And precisely for that reason, the moment carried a different weight — the weight of a door just opened.

Teqball was introduced to the Asiad programme for the first time at Asiad 20. To most Vietnamese fans it remains an unfamiliar name, often confused with table tennis or beach football. But in that arena on that morning I saw a sport with its own grammar, its own rules and its own technical culture waiting to be read.

Teqball was born from the idea of folding football onto a curved table. Players may not use their hands or arms. The ball may only be touched with the foot, thigh, chest or head. The same body part may not touch the ball twice in a row. Nobody may touch the table. In doubles the rules are even stricter: the two teammates must alternate touches, and may touch the ball at most three times before sending it back over. One broken rhythm, one misplaced step, and the point is gone.

That is why I always tell young colleagues: to understand teqball, do not look at the scoreboard, look at the feet. The feet tell the whole story of reflexes, balance and mutual trust between two people.

In the mixed doubles bronze-medal match, Minh Tan and Gia Nghi won 2-0, but how they won is what matters. The Indian pair played aggressively, served with spin and kept pressing the left corner of the table. The first set was a grind. What kept Vietnam's rhythm was a clear division of roles: Minh Tan dropped deep to hold the tempo, Gia Nghi pushed high to finish. When one lost the rhythm, the other covered instantly with a chest control and a high return, enough to break the opponent's attacking shape.

One small detail caught my eye. Midway through the second set, after losing a point, Minh Tan did not look at the scoreboard. He looked at Gia Nghi and nodded once. That is an internal signal, the kind a television camera never captures. In teqball doubles, eye contact matters as much as technique. The two players stand more than two metres apart and the arena noise swallows any spoken word. Only the eyes do the work.

The key point is this: teqball doubles is not two good individuals added together, but a two-person system that must learn to breathe on one rhythm. The Vietnamese pair won because they understood each other in the silences, not in the rallies.

The joy had barely settled when the men's turn came. Ba Truong Giang and Le Anh Khoa stepped into the men's doubles bronze-medal match that same morning against an Iraqi pair. They lost. The sport's second medal of Asiad 20 slipped away within a few dozen minutes.

I know that feeling. Some matches last 90 minutes, yet the story lingers for decades. In teqball a match lasts only a few dozen minutes, yet the gap between a medal and going home can be a chest control off by a few centimetres. Truong Giang and Anh Khoa did not lose through lack of technique. They lost at the moments when their coordination broke, when the Iraqi pair kept switching the direction of attack and forced them to swap roles mid-rally.

Then, in karate, good news came from Bui Ngoc Nhi. That same morning she entered the women's individual kata. In her opening bout she faced host athlete Ono Maho of Japan and lost 0-5. A start that could break anyone's spirit.

Ngoc Nhi did not break. She went on to beat Choi Haeun of South Korea 5-0, then Leong Wai Yee Shannon of Singapore 4-1. Three bouts, three different emotional registers, and finally a bronze medal in women's individual kata.

What I like about Ngoc Nhi is how she handled that first defeat. In kata, the score depends on precision of movement, breathing rhythm, the sharpness of the stop and concentration. Losing 0-5 to the host is not a technical disaster — it is a psychological test. And she passed it with two near-perfect bouts.

This is a notable result for Ngoc Nhi after her marks at SEA Games 33 and Asian youth events. At Asiad 20, the Vietnamese martial artist still has a chance of another medal when she and her teammates enter the women's team kata quarter-finals against Nepal on September 22.

Looking at the medal table after almost half a day of competition, the picture is fairly clear. China moved to the top with 2 golds, 4 silvers and 1 bronze. Athlete Lin Xinyu in the women's triathlon delivered China's first gold of Asiad 20. Host Japan sits second with 2 golds and 3 bronzes. Macao, South Korea and Kazakhstan each have 1 gold, ranked third to fifth. Vietnam's delegation is ninth with 2 bronzes.

I read that table differently. Rankings only say who has the most gold. They do not say which sports are opening new opportunities, which nations are investing in a field nobody has claimed. And for a sporting nation like Vietnam, the real opportunities usually lie in sports the world has not yet divided up.

This is where I want to pause a little longer, because I believe most fans are misreading the meaning of September 20.

The common reading is: teqball is new, a bronze is lucky enough, and the men's defeat is regrettable but not worth discussing. I do not think so. What matters is not whether we won or lost one match, but that Vietnam appeared in a sport for the first time before it became a standard. Sporting history shows small nations usually have a window at two moments: when a sport is too new for the field to have separated, and when a sport is too old for the powers to bother.

Teqball at Asiad 20 is at the first moment. The gap between a bronze and a gold in this sport is currently smaller than the gap in football or athletics. That means the defeat of Truong Giang and Anh Khoa is not a full stop, but data. We know what we need: pairs trained together long term, not excellent individuals thrown together weeks before a tournament.

The second misreading is treating Ngoc Nhi's kata bronze as lighter than a gold elsewhere. In kata, the gap between gold and bronze is often half a technical point and a touch of pressure. It is a discipline where consistency matters more than brilliance, and that is precisely why an athlete who can go from 0-5 to a bronze in one day is a more valuable signal than a dominant win.

During the pandemic the stadiums were empty, yet I never heard fans' hearts more clearly. That lesson still holds at Asiad 20: new sports need spectators more than old ones, because they have no collective memory to lean on. Every teqball bronze today, told properly, becomes the first memory of a new generation of fans.

And I wonder: if in ten years teqball becomes a common school sport in Vietnam, will people remember that it all began with two young players standing still on an Asiad court, not shouting, not crying, just nodding to each other?

On September 22, Ngoc Nhi and her teammates enter the women's team kata quarter-finals against Nepal. That is the next test. For teqball, the first bronze has already done its job: it opened the door. What happens behind that door depends on whether we are willing to look at the feet instead of the scoreboard.