Can Gio: 200 metres of wife-carrying, and the women's race nobody carries

The course is 200 metres long, in Can Gio. Mr Xuan Them, 34, lowers his body and puts his arms behind him. Ms Thuy Linh, 29, grips her husband's shoulders, her legs wrapped around his waist. The signal sounds. For more than three minutes, the couple from An Suong Runners cover the distance in very short steps, knees bent, two bodies pressed into one mass. They finish first.

Not far away, on the 1.5 km children's course, a child cries in the middle of the road. The race pacers stop, take the child's hand, and walk the remaining distance to the finish line. A few hundred people standing along the route applaud. The afternoon in this coastal district east of Ho Chi Minh City closes with laughter, countdowns and medals handed to children.

Of those two moments, which will be shared more? Almost certainly the husband carrying his wife, because it is compact, it is strange, and it makes people laugh within three seconds. Precisely because that answer is so certain, I want to linger longer on the second moment, and on everything that does not appear in the frame.

The HDBank Green Marathon in Can Gio has a 42 km distance, that is 42.195 km by the World Athletics standard. One day before runners take on the main distance, the organisers put a series of side events on the course: a 200 metre wife-carrying race, a 1.5 km children's run, and a 3 km children's run. This year marked the fifth consecutive edition of the wife-carrying event. A bank is the title sponsor.

Can Gio is a coastal district with flat terrain, sea wind blowing in year round, and heat and humidity at this time of year. A course like that is friendly to beginners and harsh for long-distance runners if medical support and hydration are not planned in advance. It is the kind of terrain that invites complacency, because there are no hills to remind people that they are tired.

The model the organisers have built is not new, and it is carefully designed. A flagship distance attracts serious runners. A few family events attract non-serious runners, who come with spouses, children and neighbours. A children's course attracts parents. Together they form a funnel: the more groups feel they have a place on the course, the larger the entry numbers, and the stronger the sponsor's reason to sign again next season.

Mass running in Vietnam left its infancy behind long ago. Every weekend, in some province or city, a new race opens registration. That boom has dragged along an ecosystem of clubs, freelance coaches, neighbourhood running groups, physiotherapy services, and travel packages built around races. Can Gio, about an hour's drive from central Ho Chi Minh City, is a sensible choice for this model: far enough to feel like a trip, close enough that people still dare to sign up.

Look at the speed and it is obvious this was a stroll rather than a race. Two hundred metres in more than three minutes works out to about 1.1 metres per second, roughly 4 km per hour. A brisk walker reaches that. But reading the speed alone and drawing conclusions about the two people's fitness would misread the whole story.

The load is the decisive variable. Ms Thuy Linh can be estimated at 40 to 50 kg. For a recreational runner weighing about 65 to 70 kg, that is 55 to 75 per cent of body mass added, hanging behind the back. In that posture, stride length must shorten, the centre of gravity drops, the knees flex further, and most of the energy goes into balancing rather than driving forward. The very short steps and bent knees described in the report are not signs of weakness; they are the compulsory biomechanics of a loaded carry.

What was designed here is a race in which people cannot run fast, and it operated exactly as designed. Any speed comparison with a genuine race is a comparison addressed to the wrong place.

For a proper yardstick, look to where this discipline was born. The Wife Carrying World Championships are held annually in Sonkajarvi, Finland, on a 253.5 metre course with obstacles and a water crossing. Winning times there usually land near one minute, around 4.2 metres per second, nearly four times faster than the Can Gio course. The gap does not come from Finns being stronger than Vietnamese. It comes from format: over there it is a discipline with lifting technique, pair selection, officials and couples who train year round; over here it is a group game on a festival afternoon.

The fact that World Athletics has no event called wife carrying says enough. There is no record to break, no qualifying standard, no seasonal ranking, and no anti-doping framework engaged. A winning pair in Can Gio enters no performance system. They enter a different story, and that story runs on laughter rather than seconds.

In this story, Ms Thuy Linh appears in two entirely different roles, exactly one day apart. On day one she is weight: something lifted, held tight, carried across a finish line, and the reason the crowd laughs. On day two she is a marathon runner over 42 km, putting her own feet on every metre, responsible for her own heart rate, body temperature and every sip of water.

In the first role she is seen the most and credited the least. In the second she is credited the most and seen the least. That inversion is bigger than a harmless joke; it is how a crowd allocates attention, and in mass sport attention is the real currency.

Money in a mass race comes from three sources: entry fees, corporate sponsorship and local budgets. A bank that puts its name on a race usually does not do so out of a love of athletics. It does so for community, for image, for future customers who will remember the name when they walk into a branch. That is brand recognition combined with social responsibility, and it is entirely rational within its own logic. But precisely because the money is spent on brand logic, it always flows towards whatever produces the most impression per dong spent. A three-second viral photo has higher media value than hundreds of women quietly completing 42 km under the sun.

Here lies a measurement gap, and that gap is the most important part of the story. An organiser can state exactly how many people registered, how many finished, how many medals were handed out. Very few organisers publish the share of women among entrants by distance, the share of women in the leading groups, the media budget allocated to women's events, or the gap in actual prize money received by men and women. What is not measured is not seen. What is not seen is not fixed. And a loop left unfixed for five years will dress itself up under the fine name of tradition.

I say this after five years living in Nairobi, where I write about athletics for a market in which every big name already has hundreds of writers. In 2026 I watched the Kenya Under-17 women play Ethiopia Under-17 at Kasarani. A sixteen-year-old named Achieng scored twice in the final twelve minutes, overturning the match into a 2-1 win. I wrote about her. My editor returned the piece with one line: nobody reads women's football. I posted it on my personal blog. Within a week it was shared more than two thousand times, and an NGO reached out to fund a scholarship for Achieng.

The lesson I kept from that is simple: what is dismissed as something nobody reads is usually something that has never been written properly. And the people who decide who deserves to be written about usually sit in a room very far from the course.

In 2026, that same piece took me to the World Cup in Russia as a freelance reporter. In the media area I met Aminata, twenty-nine, a communications officer for the Senegal national team, who was barred from her own team's dressing room simply because she was a woman. I wrote a 1,500-word piece about the women who ran that World Cup from behind the scenes. It drew about 50,000 reads, many times the mainstream pieces published the same day.

Behind the stadium lights, the women whisper what the whole world has not yet heard.

I retell the Kenya stories to point out that I have seen this pattern before: a sports community using laughter at the edges as its face, while its core — women who train properly, race properly, take injuries properly — sits outside the frame. In Can Gio, that core is Ms Thuy Linh and the other women on the 42 km course, the ones nobody carries across any finish line.

At this point I have to argue against myself, because the claim that side events are crowding out women's events slides easily into a wrong conclusion: that the wife-carrying race should be scrapped. I do not think so. An afternoon when a whole family goes out to run together is a good afternoon. A child who runs 1.5 km today will remember the course as a happy place, and that memory has real value in keeping people in the sport for years. Many adults running 42 km today started with a pointless children's race at school or in a park.

The children's course is the part I trust most from that day. A child running 1.5 km today is a 5 km runner in three years, a 21 km runner in seven, and possibly a 42 km runner in ten. That age group generates no news, but it generates the mass base for an entire running market behind it: shoes, watches, nutrition, race travel, medical services. When a child cries mid-course and a pacer takes their hand to the finish line, what is being built is not speed, but the memory that the course knows how to lift people up.

The course remembers the hands that lift someone back to their feet, longer than it remembers the medals.

It should also be said clearly: the presence of a pacer beside a crying child is evidence that the safety supervision worked. It is a small detail but a noteworthy one, because it shows the organisers had planned for the worst case in the most vulnerable age group.

The real risk that day lay elsewhere: heat and humidity. Can Gio in this hot, humid stretch of the year makes sweat slow to evaporate, body temperature slow to drop, and heart rate slow to return to a safe zone after each effort. A 200 metre stretch carrying 40 to 50 kg is already enough to load the lower back and knee joints of the carrier. Add 42 km the next day, and those two bodies need serious rest and hydration, not merely a full night's sleep.

Based on my experience covering long-distance races, when an organiser writes a human-carrying event into the rulebook, three things should exist from the registration stage: load categories, minimum health screening for both participants, and lifting-posture guidance before the start. The source does not state whether the race did these things, so I simply note that this is a gap worth addressing in future editions.

On the rules side, no World Athletics or world anti-doping framework is engaged here, and applying such a framework to a family event would be misplaced. What applies is the organiser's own rulebook: how long the course is, who may carry whom, whether mid-course substitutions are allowed, who is responsible in the event of a collision. A side event only needs a decently written safety code to run for years.

Gender equality in sport is not a battle with men, but a match against prejudice.

The woman running 42 km in Can Gio is not weak; we simply keep looking towards where the laughter is.

What I want to see next season is very concrete and very cheap: the organisers publishing the share of women by distance, the share of the budget allocated to women's events, and the share of women in the leading groups of each age bracket. If that data is brought into the light, the wife-carrying event will find its correct place on its own — a family game at the edge of the festival, fun enough to keep, small enough not to consume the whole frame. And Ms Thuy Linh, along with thousands of other women on Vietnam's mass running courses, will no longer have to complete 42 km just to be seen.

The change is happening, slowly but genuinely. In recreational running clubs, more and more women stand in pacing and group-coaching roles that a decade ago were almost exclusively male. Women's running groups in the big cities organise their own early-morning sessions and share knowledge about menstrual cycles, nutrition and injury, subjects that ten years ago were hardly mentioned on any course. That is the sediment, the part beneath the visible surface of the news, and it is the part that will shape this sport over the next ten years.

And in Can Gio, a child cried in the middle of the 1.5 km course and was led across the finish line. What remains, for those who stage races and those who write about them, is to lift the right people — and to lift the other half of the course as well.