Vietnamese bodybuilding is failing to meet its potential because of a shortage of funds, said the head of the Weightlifting-Bodybuilding Division

Bodybuilder Pham Van Mach.

Do Dinh Khang, the head of the Weightlifting-Bodybuilding Division, said that performance showed that Viet Nam could prosper on the international circuit if funding was found.

He added that bodybuilders needed a special diet to compete, which few could afford.

He said that bodybuilders from Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, India, Malaysia and Iran were all better financed than their Vietnamese counterparts.

Despite that, Vietnamese athletes are holding their own, Khang said.

He said that Pham Van Mach and Nguyen Van Lam were now almost unrivalled on the world stage.

World champion bodybuilder Mach won his fifth Asian title in the men’s 55kg division after beating Iran’s Khajavi Jafarabad and the UAE’s Hussain Alammar.

Mach, 33, who is 1.51m tall, won Asian titles in 2004, 05, 07 and 08.

In the Southeast Asian championships in 2007, Lam bagged gold for Viet Nam in the men’s 70kg. He finished second at the Asian championships and third at the worlds.

“I highly appreciate Vietnamese athletes’ achievement in this event, especially Mach and Lam,” Khang said.

“The State expenditure for bodybuilding isn’t high. They had to pay for their health drinks with their own money. This personal investment helped them win. If we had the same investment as Thailand [A Thai bodybuilder receives US$1,000 for cooking and $500 for health drinks monthly], Vietnamese bodybuilders would win more golds,” he said. “At the moment, each Vietnamese athlete in the national team gets just VND120,000 ($6.7) for nutrition per day.

“Vietnamese bodybuilding needs to find new funding. The Viet Nam Bodybuilding Federation needs to find sponsors. This is how the Thailand Bodybuilding Federation and many other federations meets their athletes’ training costs,” Khang said.

Bodybuilding will not be an event at this December’s Southeast Asian Games and the Asian Games in next March. However, it will feature at the World Championship this November.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News