A Day of Weight Classes: Ju-Jitsu, Taekwondo and Freestyle Wrestling at the Asian Games

A Day of Weight Classes: Ju-Jitsu, Taekwondo and Freestyle Wrestling at the Asian Games In the press room of the Vietnamese delegation, a competition schedule was printed out and pinned to the wall. I stood looking at it longer than necessary. Three martial arts sat side by side on the same sheet of paper: Ju-Jitsu, Taekwondo and freestyle wrestling. Each discipline with its own time slot, each time slot with its own weight class. What made me stop was not the clock figures, but the emptiness beside the athletes' names. No opponent names. No head-to-head records. No form notes. Just nine names, nine weight classes, and a bracket of qualifiers waiting ahead. That is how a martial-arts competition day begins: with a piece of paper, not with a fight. I have covered five editions of international multi-sport games. Every time, the moment before the first whistle is the quietest moment. The training hall is empty, yet you can still hear the pulse of an entire delegation preparing itself. Today, that pulse converges on three martial arts, where each athlete stands alone on the mat but is backed by an entire training system, a coaching staff, and a state-funded sports structure built over the long term. Before going into each discipline, the context must be made clear, because without it a reader can easily misjudge the meaning of a day like this. The Asian Games is not a commercial event in the manner of professional boxing. It is a stage governed by the Olympic Council of Asia, where national delegations send athletes to compete under a medal system: one champion per weight class, no belts, no exclusive contracts, no cross-promotional superfights. Every analytical lens built for the professional fight world — pay-per-view revenue, contract leverage, the commercial value of an individual fighter — does not apply here. Forcing them on would be a methodological error. For the Vietnamese delegation, the "event" is not a single fight card but the aggregate performance of a delegation spanning many sports. Every result in Ju-Jitsu, Taekwondo and freestyle wrestling feeds into a single medal table. This structure shapes how the media reports: a competition day is told as a chapter in a larger story about national prestige, not as an individual fighter's file. The three martial arts on today's schedule all follow the same structure: qualification rounds first, medal rounds after. Ju-Jitsu runs under the rules of the Ju-Jitsu International Federation (JJIF). Taekwondo runs under World Taekwondo's Kyorugi ruleset. Freestyle wrestling runs under United World Wrestling (UWW) rules. All three are weight-class disciplines, meaning that before stepping onto the mat, an athlete must pass through the weigh-in. This structure is not accidental. At a multi-sport games with thousands of athletes, organisers must compress each weight class into a single day to save time and venues. The consequence is that every martial-arts athlete must be ready for a high-intensity day in which qualifiers and medal rounds sit close together. There is no room for delay, and no room to save energy for tomorrow — because everything happens today. The weigh-in: a ritual few ever see There is a ritual that takes place before spectators fill the stands. It is the weigh-in. For weight-class sports, this is the first gate, and sometimes the harshest. Weighing in for a combat sport is not merely stepping on a scale. It is the result of days of weight management, diet and rehydration. In Ju-Jitsu, Taekwondo and freestyle wrestling, rapid weight-cutting to make a division is a common reality. From a sports-medicine standpoint, this is a documented risk zone: dehydration reduces strength, slows reflexes and raises injury risk. On a compressed competition day, the window between weigh-in and the first bout is often very short. An athlete must simultaneously rehydrate, recover and hold onto a competitive feel. This is the work of medical and nutrition teams — people who never appear on the medal table yet decide part of the outcome. I once watched a young athlete step onto the scale with a pale face, then walk into a bout two hours later. He won. But what I remember is not that victory; it is the silence before he stepped onto the mat. What happens in silence often decides more than what happens in front of the cameras. Ju-Jitsu: a discipline that looks gentle but carries the heaviest technique load Sport Ju-Jitsu is not what most people imagine. Many see the throws and locks and think it is a "soft" discipline. The reality is the opposite. JJIF rules allow a bout to end by choke, joint lock and technical points, so most of the time on the mat is a battle for position, hip control and grip. An athlete can win a bout without throwing a single strike, simply by holding a lock until the referee acknowledges it. Today, Vietnam fields Ngo Thi Thao Van in the women's 63kg and Nguyen Tien Trien in the men's 85kg. Nguyen Thi Minh Vuong is also part of the Ju-Jitsu roster. One small detail stands out: the organisers published exact final times for two categories — women's 63kg at 11:00 and men's 85kg at 11:25. For Taekwondo and wrestling, this information was not repeated in the same way. In newsroom practice, publishing the final time of a weight class is often the desk's signal about medal potential. That is a newsroom convention, not a data-backed claim. I make this explicit so readers do not mistake an editorial choice for a performance forecast. But it also shows that the coaching staff and domestic media are placing more expectation on the Ju-Jitsu mat than on the other two disciplines. Technically, sport Ju-Jitsu splits into two parts: fighting and demonstration. In the fighting discipline, points are scored when an athlete secures a controlling position, executes a throw, or finishes with a lock. Unlike wrestling, Ju-Jitsu permits more choking and joint-locking techniques, so the capacity to endure pain plays a large role. Practitioners must learn to accept joint pain and to know when to tap out. This is one of the disciplines that demands the highest level of composure, because a wrong decision in a fraction of a second can lead to injury. I once sat through a Ju-Jitsu training session with young athletes. What stayed with me was not the beautiful techniques but the endurance. Some drilled a single lock for three hours, only to use it once in a bout. In martial arts, what is seen on the mat is only the tip of a repetition process nobody counts. Before becoming a name on a schedule sheet, each of them was just a person learning to endure the scrutiny of their own gaze. For Ju-Jitsu, entering athletes in two different weight classes reflects a deeper approach. Rather than concentrating on one division, the delegation spreads across both women's and men's categories. This is a common strategy for delegations with limited resources: increase the number of touch points rather than the probability at a single point. It reflects risk-management thinking in elite sport, where nothing is staked on one weight class alone. Taekwondo: where the weight class and the head decide Taekwondo Kyorugi is a full-contact discipline in which head strikes score. This is what makes its risk profile different from the other two. A clean kick to the head can swing a bout, but it also accumulates head impact across rounds. On a competition day full of qualifiers, the number of impacts can rise quickly. Vietnam has Le Tuan in the men's 68kg, Bac Thi Khiem in the women's 67kg, and Tran Ho Nhan Van in the men's 80kg. All three start from the qualification rounds. In Taekwondo, the gap between qualifiers and medal rounds can be just a few hours, meaning an athlete may fight several bouts in one day, separated by short recovery windows. On the rules, modern Kyorugi uses electronic scoring gear. Points are awarded by target zone and difficulty. Head strikes are worth more than body strikes, and spinning techniques more still. This encourages speed and precision, but also pushes athletes toward chasing spectacular techniques for big points. The risk is that chasing a beautiful kick can open a gap. This creates a stamina-management problem. On a compressed day, the winner is often not the athlete with the prettiest technique but the one who rations energy across rounds. I have watched many young fighters win a qualifier with everything they had, only to collapse in the next bout. Competition experience teaches one simple lesson: in the qualifiers, win with the minimum necessary. Taekwondo is also one of the disciplines on the Olympic pathway, so results here carry meaning beyond a single day's medal. Ranking points and future qualification slots depend on accumulated results. That is why every bout, even a qualifier, has its own value. In Vietnam, Taekwondo has a training base spread across the country, from grassroots clubs to professional training centres. This popularity produces a deep pool of athletes but also creates the challenge of selecting and developing the individuals capable of competing internationally. A place at a continental games is the result of a long selection chain, not of a single training session. Behind every name on the schedule sheet are years of training and repeated cuts before selection. Freestyle wrestling: a battle of joints and balance Freestyle wrestling under UWW rules is a grappling discipline in which most results come from securing control, pinning and technical points. From a sports-medicine standpoint, it places heavy stress on the shoulder, knee and lower back. On a day with multiple bouts, cumulative injury risk rises with the number of hard impacts. Vietnam has Pham Nhu Duy in the men's 57kg, Nguyen Thi My Linh in the women's 53kg, and Nguyen Thi My Trang in the women's 57kg. These are three divisions spread across the lighter weights, where speed and technique matter more than raw strength. On the rules, freestyle wrestling allows athletes to use the legs for attack and defence, unlike Greco-Roman, which restricts action to the upper body. This opens more techniques but demands a higher degree of whole-body coordination. Points are scored when an athlete secures control over an opponent, or when the opponent is taken to the mat in a dangerous position. In wrestling, the decisive factor is usually the ability to win position first. Whoever controls the stance early carries an advantage through the bout. I have watched many wrestling matches at games, and what I learned is that seemingly small holding actions decide the flow more than showy throws. In wrestling, raw strength is not enough. The winner is usually the one who keeps a low centre of gravity, controls the hips, and forces the opponent to react rather than initiate. This is the discipline where tactical thinking shows most clearly in the opening seconds of each period, when the two athletes are still probing each other. A small error in weight placement can lead to being pinned immediately. That is why wrestlers spend much of their preparation on balance and reflexes, not just on strength. The problem of an entire delegation What is worth thinking about is not each discipline in isolation, but how they are placed on the same day. Three martial arts, nine athletes, all starting from qualifiers. For a delegation, this is how resources are allocated: coaching, medical and psychological support must be spread across several competition points running in parallel. At a multi-sport games, the pressure does not only come from opponents. It comes from the schedule. A wrestler may weigh in during the morning, compete in qualifiers mid-morning, and, if winning, step into the medal rounds just hours later. The gap between bouts is not enough for full recovery, so managing the body's fuel becomes part of the tactics. This is the point the media usually skips when reporting medals. People count medals; few count the hours waiting between two bouts, the number of weigh-ins, the nights of short sleep before competition day. Those numbers never appear on the medal table, but they help create the result. For Vietnam, entering athletes in all three martial arts on the same day shows a spread strategy. Rather than concentrating resources on one sport, the delegation distributes across many weight classes. The upside is more opportunities; the downside is thinner support resources. A delegation at a continental stage operates like a small ecosystem. Doctors, coaches, analysts and logistics staff all contribute to the final result. When an athlete steps onto the mat, behind them stands a collective that has prepared for months, even years. I once stood in the corridor of a competition venue, watching coaches time their stopwatches and note every exchange. They never appear on television, but without them there would be no medals at all. The day also includes other sports outside the martial-arts scope, but they are worth mentioning for the full picture. Vietnam's women's sepak takraw team entered a medal match against Thailand, a traditional regional rival. The match was placed prominently by the desk, revealing another current of community emotion: expectation around a regional rivalry. Alongside it, golf and volleyball closed the day, forming a time frame stretching from morning to evening. How a newsroom arranges the day's sports reflects its priorities, and sometimes the public's too. The contrarian view: counting medals may not be right There is a common understanding I want to reset. Many believe that a competition day with more martial arts means a bigger medal chance. That reasoning ignores a fact: different sports have different levels of competitiveness, and not every sport contributes equally to the Olympic pathway. The Asian Games places Taekwondo and freestyle wrestling in the Olympic-system group, while Ju-Jitsu is a relatively new sport on the continental stage. That a newspaper placed all three on the same schedule sheet, without distinguishing Olympic value, shows that media priorities sometimes lean toward medal quantity rather than the long-term value of each sport. This is not wrong, but it leaves a gap. When a country invests in a martial art, the right question is not how many medals today, but whether this sport can sustain a generation of athletes over the next ten years. Ju-Jitsu, as a newly added games sport, may be on the right path of institutionalisation. But to judge that, one must look beyond a single competition day. Another point is often misunderstood: winning a qualifier does not mean a medal. The qualifier-then-medal structure forces each athlete to survive a chain of bouts before reaching the medal group. At the time this article was written, the results did not yet exist. Any forecast is expectation, not data. This is what I always remind myself before writing about a day that has not happened: do not turn expectation into conclusion. There is another trend worth noting: the media tends to personalise achievement. A medal is usually attached to an individual, while in reality it is the product of many generations of coaches, many gyms and many quiet sacrifices. When one person is celebrated, people easily forget that Japanese martial arts in particular and Asian martial arts in general are the product of a collective. I have witnessed too many winners who lost their dignity, and too many losers who kept something more precious. On this point, I want to recall an image I once saw. After a defeat at a games, the fans quietly stayed behind to clear the rubbish from the stands, while the athletes lay collapsed on the floor. They picked up every piece of rubbish in Rostov, leaving behind a dignity greater than a defeat. That lesson applies to how we view a martial-arts competition day too: the result is only one part; how people treat one another during and after the contest is the part that stays longer. Signals to watch next This competition day leaves a few notable signals. First, Ju-Jitsu is being treated as a genuine medal path, shown by the publication of exact final times. Second, the simultaneous presence of Taekwondo and freestyle wrestling shows Vietnam is maintaining investment in Olympic-value sports. Third, the spread of weight classes — from women's 53kg to men's 85kg — reveals a strategy of distribution across many weight levels rather than concentration on one point. What I want readers to take away is not a medal forecast, but a way of looking. When the media clamours over results, real talent still walks quietly on the field. And on a day like today, what is worth watching is not only who wins, but how a delegation organises itself before stepping onto the mat.