Wushu Taolu's B Panel: The Data Gap Vietnam's Athletes Must Cover With Their Own Bodies

At taolu competitions, coaches are not allowed to sit beside the mat. Their seats are in the stands, twelve rows back, behind the organisers' barriers, with three judging panels bent over score sheets in front of them. On the occasions Duong Thuy Vi walked onto the floor for a spear routine at a SEA Games, her coach could only see the back of his athlete from above. What he could not see were the three figures that would decide the medal: the A score for movement quality, the B score for performance level, the C score for difficulty. The empty chair never lies — it only exposes what we do not want to hear. In a martial art judged by demonstration, the distance between athlete and judge is not twelve rows. It is the fact that the total score is published the moment the drum sounds, while the three components that make it up are almost never fully released to the public.

Modern wushu exists in two forms that have almost nothing to do with each other. Sanda is combat: there is impact, a referee on the floor, a replay screen, blood. Taolu is demonstration: there is a carpet, music, three judging panels in three corners and a drum that announces the end. Outsiders lump both under one word, "martial arts", and assume they operate on the same logic. They do not. Sanda is a sport of distance and timing. Taolu is a sport of memory and absolute precision.

A competitive taolu routine lasts between seventy seconds and just over two minutes, depending on the event. Bare-hand forms include changquan, nanquan and taijiquan. Weapon forms include jianshu, daoshu, qiangshu, gunshu, nandao, nangun and taijijian. There is also duilian, in which two or three athletes perform a sequence so tightly matched that it looks like a real fight. Throughout that time, the athlete may not stop, may not forget, may not let the weapon leave the hand, may not lose balance beyond the permitted margin. A landing at the wrong angle can erase seventy flawless seconds that came before it.

A taolu scoresheet totals ten points, divided into three panels. Panel A covers movement quality, up to 5.0 points, deducted step by step for specific technical faults. Panel B covers performance level, up to 3.0 points, scored on power, speed, rhythm, balance and expression. Panel C covers difficulty, up to 2.0 points, calculated from a pre-declared catalogue of hard movements. These panels sit in three different positions, record their sheets independently, and none of them is permitted to see another's sheet before the total score is locked in.

The difficulty system — known inside the sport as nandu — was introduced into official competition in the early 2000s. Before that, taolu was almost entirely a story of feel. After that, it became a problem with an answer key. This was the biggest turning point in the sport's history, and also the least discussed outside professional circles.

For Vietnam, taolu is not a peripheral playground. According to the records of the Vietnam Wushu Federation, Nguyen Thuy Hien was the first Vietnamese world champion in the sport, at the World Wushu Championships held in Kuala Lumpur in 2026. After her came a chain of generations linked by medals: Duong Thuy Vi with her jianshu and qiangshu routines, Hoang Thi Phuong Giang, and a steady stream of young athletes appearing at SEA Games and continental championships. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam is among the countries with the deepest taolu record, and most of those medals came from routines decided by three judging panels within two minutes.

Panel A is the easiest for spectators to understand, and the one most often misread. Its five points are not a bonus for beauty. They are a deduction for error. Every technical fault in the catalogue — a foot landing in the wrong position, the body drifting off axis during a rotation, the weapon trembling at a hold, a loss of balance in a low stance — costs a fixed deduction. Panel A judges do not assess whether an athlete is good or bad. They count faults.

That sounds objective. Imagine a changquan routine with more than forty movements packed into seventy seconds, and three judges counting faults in real time, each from a different angle. A landing that is three degrees off can look like a fault from the left side of the floor and look perfectly normal from the right. Panel A is not a measuring instrument. Panel A is three pairs of human eyes, limited by angle, by speed, and by the fact that each pair can only see part of the movement.

I once sat close enough to a judging table to notice something television never conveys. When a routine ends, the three Panel A judges do not look at each other. They write, turn their sheets face down, and pass them to the secretary. That silence is part of the procedure. But it also means that if three people counted three different results, none of them knows they miscounted until the total score appears on the board.

Panel C is the one most easily assumed to be scientific, and in fact it is the most scientific — in the way a price list is scientific. Before each routine, the athlete submits a difficulty declaration form listing the hard elements to be performed: multi-rotation aerial turns, difficult balance positions, controlled falls. Every element in the catalogue carries a fixed point value set by the international federation.

That clarity produces what the trade calls a "difficulty menu". Athletes do not choose hard elements freely. They choose from a menu, and each choice is converted into a number. A five-hundred-and-forty-degree rotation is worth something different from a seven-hundred-and-twenty-degree rotation. Bare hands are worth something different from hands holding a weapon. Panel C turns art into accounting, and that is not wrong — it only means the genuinely creative part of a taolu routine is not the hard elements, but the way they are stitched together.

For a country with a long taolu tradition such as Vietnam, this system is both an opportunity and a trap. An opportunity, because difficulty points can be trained, measured and optimised through a syllabus. A trap, because once every team can optimise Panel C, the decision falls back to Panel B — where no syllabus is ever enough.

Panel B's three points are the murkiest part of the entire system. The regulations describe them with concepts such as power, speed, rhythm, coordination between hand and eye, between weapon and body, and "expression". This is the language of art, not of technical specification. Each Panel B judge must convert those concepts into a decimal figure, and they do so within seconds of the routine ending.

The spread between Panel B judges is the most honest indicator of how subjective a panel is, and almost nobody publishes it. In many judged sports, individual judges' scores are released, sometimes with the highest and lowest discarded to reduce personal influence. In taolu, the board shown to spectators usually displays only a panel total, sometimes combined, and rarely reveals how far apart the three Panel B judges actually were.

This creates a paradox familiar to anyone who has worked in sports media. Sports that publish detailed data are criticised more, but trusted more. Sports that keep data closed are criticised less, but the moment a contentious result appears, trust collapses faster. Taolu belongs to the second group.

I mispronounced a name, but the system mispronounced all of us. I first wrote that line after a night in Russia, when I got a midfielder's name wrong three times in the first half and was mocked online for it. I spent the following month building a pronunciation table of more than five hundred names. The lesson was not that I erred. The lesson was that the system let me err without any mechanism catching it before I went on air. In taolu, that mechanism is even weaker.

Picture a SEA Games with wushu on the programme. After each event, the organisers publish every athlete's total score. Television flashes that board for a few seconds. Reporters copy the total. Nobody copies the three columns, A, B and C. Nobody copies the individual judges' marks. And so, when a gold medal leaves the hands of a Vietnamese athlete by half a point, nobody has enough data to answer the simplest question: where did that half point go?

An empty season does not lack spectators — it lacks data about the heart. I wrote that line for the 2026 season without crowds, when I had to build a quantitative framework from the data of ten European clubs to show that home advantage disappeared when the stands were empty. The same principle applies here: if you cannot measure what you are talking about, you are commenting on your own feelings, not on the sport.

Based on my experience covering matches and martial arts events over more than thirty years, I have never seen a regional-level taolu scoresheet published in full, down to each individual judge. The problem is not that organisers are hiding data because something shady is going on. The problem is that this sport was never designed to be audited. Paper sheets, handwritten, handed to a secretary, compiled in software, total score published. No public database preserves individual judges' marks across competitions. That means an entire industry — coaches, athletes, reporters, researchers — works with half the data and confidently believes it is seeing the whole picture.

If Panel B is the deciding part, then the question worth asking about Vietnamese wushu is not "how do we jump higher" but "who teaches presence". And this is where the story gets interesting.

Panel B points are not taught in a physical training syllabus. They come from how many other athletes' routines a fighter has watched, how many times a coach who understands international standards has corrected them, and how many years of martial culture they have absorbed before stepping onto the carpet. In countries with strong school wushu systems, athletes soak this up from childhood. In Vietnam, most athletes come to wushu through provincial and municipal sports centres, with uneven training conditions and a limited number of domestic competitions.

That means part of a Vietnamese athlete's score is decided by things that are not on the carpet at all. It lies in whether the coach can attend courses updating international regulations, whether they can watch footage of world championships, and whether there is enough budget to send athletes abroad for competitive exposure.

I have written many times that we learn nothing from what goes right — only from what falls out of rhythm. In taolu, what falls out of rhythm sits on the Panel B sheet, and we are not allowed to see that sheet.

In Bangkok, where I live, muay Thai is a martial art judged in public in a completely different way. A professional muay Thai bout has five rounds, three judges, and a 10-9 scoring system applied round by round. After each round, spectators inside the stadium can guess who is ahead, because the logic of scoring is passed down orally: who controls the rhythm, who lands cleanly, who holds the shape of the fight.

But muay Thai has its own problem, and on one point that problem is identical to taolu's. Both sports rest on a human moment of judgement, and neither publishes enough data for that moment to be checked. The difference is that muay Thai has a media industry large enough to force controversies into the light, while taolu does not.

I once witnessed, in a press room at Rajamangala in 2026, an older male colleague sneer when I asked the home team's head coach about a lopsided left flank. I did not argue. I recorded the full movement chart of a midfielder across ninety minutes, and seven tactical blind spots were later published on a regional federation's analysis page. That experience taught me something applicable to every martial art: evidence comes first, emotion second. If Panel B does not publish its sheets, the first job of an analyst is to demand the sheets, not to write about spirit.

The popular narrative about taolu goes like this: it is a sport with an artistic element, art is subjective, and therefore results are always partly unfair. That narrative sounds reasonable, and it is wrong about where to place the emphasis.

Taolu's biggest problem is not that Panel B is subjective. The problem is that Panels A and C are assumed to be objective when both contain human judgement. Panel A is three pairs of eyes counting faults across seventy seconds under real-time pressure. Panel C is a price list written by people, and every time the international federation revises that list, every country's entire training strategy has to be rewritten.

The second point matters more: the difficulty system, celebrated as this sport's scientific advance, is precisely what has made taolu frighteningly uniform. When every team crams the highest-value hard elements into its routine, world-class taolu begins to look like a catalogue executed in the correct order. The difference between athletes is no longer what they do, but how they do it. And how they do it is Panel B.

Put another way, the system has pushed the entire soul of the martial art into the very panel it lacks the tools to measure, then used the other two panels to create the impression that everything can be counted. It is a structure that is elegant technically and fragile in terms of trust.

Every mispronunciation is a system trying to say something. My error in Russia was not in my mouth. It was in a process with no checking step. Taolu's error is not in the Panel B judges. It is in a results system that publishes outcomes without publishing how it arrived at them.

What I want to see at the next SEA Games is not another wushu gold medal for Vietnam, though that medal will come. What I want to see is a complete scoresheet: the three columns A, B and C, and every individual judge's mark, published after the competition ends. When that data exists, a coach in Nghe An or Ho Chi Minh City can open a laptop and tell an athlete exactly where they are losing points. And then the seat twelve rows up in the stands will no longer be a place of fog. What you measure on a screen is not the appeal — it is what you hear in the silence. For taolu, that silence has lasted far too long.