>>> Wushu martial artists bring home first two golds
As expected, Duc Anh defeated host’s athlete Khairul Anuar Mohamad 6-2 in the men’s one-string bow archery event to earn the first gold medal for the Vietnamese archery team in this year’s SEA Games. The team won two silvers and one bronze in previous competitions.
Previously, Anh performed extremely well as he defeated another host player Muhammad Akmal Nor Hasrin with the score of 6-2 in the semi-final to reach the final match.
Duc Anh is the only Vietnamese archer presenting in the semi-finals of the men's and women's singles. His teammate, Loc Thi Dao, who won the gold medal in the women’s one-string bow at the Asian event in March, lost in the quarterfinals.
The hope for additional medals is still in the hearts of Vietnamese archers as in the next two days they will play doubles and mixed one-string bow events.
After the first two gold medals in the morning, Vietnam’s wushu team won another bronze medal in the afternoon, thanks to Nguyen Thuc Anh’s performance in the female’s Nanquan event. Anh score a relative high score of 9.63, but could not beat host’s Diana Bong with 9.66 points in the first place.
In wushu Nandao + Nangun finals (taking the total score of the two contests to consider the medals), Vietnam sends two competitors to join in, namely Cao Khac Dat and Pham Quoc Khanh. Both of them performed and scored the same points of 9.66, however still lagged behind a Myanmar athlete with 9.67 points. It is expected that the athletes will play Nangun the next day.
After the start of the SEA Games campaign without positive results in the morning, the table tennis team won a bronze medal in women’s doubles thanks to Mai Hoang My Trang/Nguyen Thi Nga’s efforts. The duo lost to Singapore athletes Yu Mengyu/Feng Tian Wei 1-3 in semi-finals and accepted the bronze.
This is the second bronze for Vietnamese table tennis at the 29th SEA Games after the first bronze won by Dinh Quang Linh and My Trang in the mixed doubles hours earlier. Linh/Trang also lost to a Singapore's duo Pang Xue Jie/Yu Mengyu 0-3 in semi-finals.
On Sunday afternoon, Vietnamese women football team earned a 3-1 win against strong rivals Myanmar. Considered the top two favourites for the gold medal, both teams had set a must-win task prior to the clash. In the women football event, five teams compete in a round robin format to select the top three teams for the medal set.
Vietnam’s U22 male football team will enter their third game later this evening with U22 Philippines. Meanwhile, the male futsal team will also play their second match with hosts Malaysia.
