When Martial Arts Analysts Score Taolu With a Win–Loss Record

On a newsroom desk in Incheon, I once laid two sheets of paper side by side. One was a 10–9 scorecard from a professional boxing bout: three judges, a mandatory scale, every round must produce a winner. The other was the score sheet for a wushu taolu routine: three judging panels, points for movement quality, points for overall performance, points for difficulty, deductions if the weapon slips out of the hand. A colleague swept both into a single data file and labelled it with one word: martial arts.

Last week that very file ran through an automated analysis pipeline and came back empty. No fighter names, no bouts, no metrics. Just one dry status line: insufficient information to analyse. A technical pipeline collapsed, and it collapsed for a reason more worth discussing than any wrong analysis: nobody had determined which kind of martial art the subject actually was.

The story repeats at every major Games. The organiser publishes a medal table, newsroom data desks pull a file called martial arts, and from that file people write very loud sentences: the host nation's martial arts scene is dominating the region, or some country's martial arts are falling behind. SEA Games 31 in Hanoi is the cleanest example. Vietnam topped the overall table with 205 gold medals, 125 silver and 116 bronze, and a large share of those golds came from a group of sports crammed into one drawer: vovinam, wushu, muay, pencak silat, karate, taekwondo, judo and boxing.

That drawer looks so tidy that people forget what sits inside it are competition systems that differ in their very nature. Based on my experience watching bouts from SEA Games through to world wushu championships, the single most serious systemic error sits in classification, not in calculation. Adding up medals is something any machine does correctly. But once you move into judgement — who is improving, who is stalling, who has been figured out — the labelling decision determines every conclusion that follows.

In taolu, the athlete walks onto the floor alone. Nobody stands opposite to strike or be struck. Three judging panels award three separate sets of points: quality of movement, overall composition of the routine, and the difficulty of jumps and connecting sequences. Deductions appear when an athlete loses balance, forgets the routine, or lets a weapon slip. The correct dataset for a taolu athlete should contain the difficulty declared before stepping onto the floor, the completion rate of hard elements, the number of deductions across the last three competitions, and the stability gap between qualifying and final. A win rate in taolu is an empty concept, because in a routine nobody loses, only someone scores lower. Duong Thuy Vi, with years at the top of the regional jian and qiang events, is invoked as an icon, yet if a dataset records only two words, win and loss, her entire skill set vanishes from the report.

Sanda reverses the picture entirely. There is an opponent, there is contact, there are three rounds, points are awarded for legal strikes to the head and body plus additional credit for forcing an opponent down or off the platform. The rules ban grappling and strikes to forbidden areas, and referees may stop the bout when one side can no longer defend. To assess a sanda athlete you count strike frequency per round, the ratio of landed strikes to thrown strikes, the ability to hold distance against a dedicated pressure fighter, and how often they get pushed to the edge. A medal table says none of that.

Boxing sits in yet another system. Three judges score on the mandatory 10–9 scale, meaning every round must produce a 10 and a 9, even when the round is too close to separate. Referees issue standing counts, a knockdown restructures the entire scoring, and one heavy round can ruin a whole fight. Nguyen Thi Thu Nhi, who once held the WBO world title at mini-flyweight, shows that a Vietnamese athlete can step into the international professional arena. To evaluate her properly you need thrown-and-landed strike data round by round, not a medal line for an entire federation.

MMA is further apart still. The unified rules score on a 10–9 scale across the whole fight, with ground control counted as a weighted criterion. Tran Quang Khai competes in ONE Championship, where knees to the head of a grounded opponent are banned and where the three-five-minute-round format looks nothing like sanda's three two-minute rounds. Muay Thai scores round by round with its own weighting for kicks and teep, and Nguyen Tran Duy Nhat is the veteran face of Vietnamese Muay. Vovinam is more tangled still, since a single competition contains both combat and forms, two criteria sets that never share a score sheet.

Every martial art carries its own kind of evidence, and collapsing four systems into one label to grade them by win and loss is the fastest way to produce a conclusion that sounds highly professional and cannot be verified.

This is not an academic matter. Sponsors read that exact report to decide where money goes. Federations use that exact report to allocate overseas training slots. And a nineteen-year-old taolu athlete can lose such a slot because a dataset did not know which sport she competes in.

When the pipeline returns an empty result, the newsroom's first reflex is to fill the gap with adjectives: iron spirit, courage, class. This is where I am most cautious, and where I want to speak plainly to my own trade: an empty file does not mean there is no risk. It means nobody has been patient enough to establish where the risk lies. Silence in sports data has never been a guarantee of safety for anyone.

People lock the stadium doors, but nobody can lock the pen. I have been asked to pull a piece because it made someone uncomfortable, and I learned that a clean dataset does not appear by itself; it is the result of someone bothering to classify before writing the first line.

Superstars are enthroned by the crowd, and dethroned by the crowd as well. That mechanism runs faster in martial arts than in any other sport. The same arena that chants a wushu athlete's name today may call her a perennial bronze medallist tomorrow, all because of one tenth of a point in a routine. For the crowd that is fine; for the analyst who carries that emotion into a report, it is not.

The year 2026 taught me that football is only the echo of people inside an age of silence. The K-League opener between Jeonbuk and Ulsan finished 1–1 in an empty stadium, and I realised applause can lift an ordinary passage of play into a moment. In martial arts it is even clearer: a 9.60 taolu routine sounds very different with a crowd and without one. Same scale, two meanings. That is why I never grade a performance by its score alone.

Do not trust the scoreboard; trust the moment, where the contest truly belongs.

I may be wrong in one place: for casual viewers, grouping is convenient. A gold medal is still a gold medal, and nobody watches television to read a three-panel judging sheet. But when that same grouping enters a dataset used for decisions, it stops being convenience and becomes distortion.

Over the next twelve months, I expect at least one regional martial arts data report to separate the forms group from the combat group before calculating any metric. The beneficiaries will not be the newsrooms, but the athletes training in empty halls, waiting for a score sheet that understands which sport they compete in. If nobody does it, that empty file will return at the next Games, and someone will still fill it with adjectives.