Incomplete Records Force Saigon Fight Card Announcement to Be Postponed

SAIGON, June 18, 2026 — The organizing committee of the summer martial arts tournament in Saigon announced yesterday that it could not yet release the official list of bouts. At a short press briefing at the committee's office, the reason given was specific: weigh-in records and medical certificates for several registered fighters remain incomplete, leaving the referee board without sufficient grounds to pair fighters by weight class. The committee chairman said the documents on hand do not match one another. The registration list names 11 fighters across three divisions: flyweight, lightweight and middleweight. The weigh-in ledger contains only 9 entries with a complete date, time and the weigher's signature. Six fighters submitted their medical certificates after the deadline. One lightweight registered as Tran Van Luc appears twice on two lists at two different weights, almost two kilograms apart. "We do not want to announce a bout and then have to correct it a few days later," the committee chairman told reporters present. "One wrong piece of paper costs the whole tournament its credibility, and credibility cannot be recovered at a press briefing." The second difficulty lies in the rules. This year's tournament is split into two disciplines: quyen, meaning performance of set forms before a judging panel, and doi khang, meaning two fighters competing on the platform. The committee has fixed the competition dates for the sparring discipline and named the referees, but the scoring scale for the forms discipline has not been approved. A delegate from one participating delegation asked whether the two disciplines would count toward a single standings table. The committee did not answer conclusively. The chief referee explained that sparring is scored on the number of clean hits, the level of initiative and the stance after each round. Forms are scored on the precision of the set, the breathing rhythm and the stability of the stances. In his view the two cannot be substituted for one another, and if the committee has not clearly defined which discipline is which, the referees cannot do their job. A martial arts master with many years of coaching in Saigon, who was present at the meeting, added: "Outsiders often see a beautiful form and assume that is strength. On the platform the story is different. If the committee puts the two into one table, the public will misunderstand both." As of yesterday afternoon, the confirmed points were: the tournament runs over four sessions of two hours each; the sparring discipline competes first; tickets are distributed at two locations in central Saigon; the referee board has five members, three of whom have worked previous martial arts tournaments. Everything else — the number of bouts, the draw time and the overall scoring method — remains open. During two training sessions on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, I stood in the empty corner of a training hall on the city's outskirts. The lightweights worked in pairs, three rounds each, with exactly one minute of rest between rounds. The coach recorded each round in a small notebook, and I noticed he also recorded the rounds in which no clean hit landed. Asked why, he said: "A round with no clean hit is still a line worth writing. Later people will ask why." Nguyen Huu Bang, one of the registered middleweights, said he had not been told the official weigh-in date. Le Thanh Cong, a flyweight, said he had submitted all his papers at the start of the month and did not know why his name was missing from the provisional list. The committee said it would publish the bout list as soon as the cross-checking of records is complete, expected within a week. The chairman stressed that the committee would rather be a few days late than publish a figure and then have to correct it. For those who have followed martial arts in Saigon in recent years, mismatched records are nothing new. What stands out this time is that the committee chose to say so plainly rather than publish for the sake of procedure. A tournament can start a few days late. A wrong record follows a fighter for an entire career. The stands were empty, but the rhythm of training held steady — and the first rhythm we learned here was not the opening bell.