The Lost Half: The Data of Bangladeshi Women's Athletics That No One Counted

February 2026, the media gallery at the National Stadium. With the National Athletics Championships results sheet in front of me, I was doing something simple—counting. Sixty-two finals were held that day. How many of them made it into the next morning's Dhaka dailies? Nine. Of those, women's events—only three. I opened a spreadsheet, built columns, and called it The Other Half. Within six weeks it had twelve hundred followers, one angry federation official, and my editor telling me it was a hobby. I never dropped the hobby. Because looking at those empty cells, I understood one thing: data nobody writes down has no existence in history. I counted the other half, and the number kept rewriting itself. Let me step back. The late 1980s into the early 1990s—Bangladeshi sprinting had a moment at the SAF Games. Shah Alam's golds, hand-timed clocks, and stadiums packed with spectators. Then the light went out. After 2026 international medals all but vanished, the domestic circuit narrowed into an Army-Navy-BKSP duopoly, and the stands slowly emptied. Many call this a defeat at cricket's hands. I don't accept that. Because a stadium emptying and a stadium being emptied are two different things. One is natural, the other is the product of a decision. The Bangladesh Athletics Federation, the journalists, and our own neglect—through their combined choices a sport was pushed to the margins. And who paid the heaviest price for that push? Women, district-town athletes, and schoolchildren—the ones whose names nobody records properly on a results sheet. Consider that two separate ledgers run side by side here. One is the ledger of medals—who brought home how much gold. The other is the ledger of people—who ran, in what time, from where. The first we keep carefully for decades, the second almost never. And it is the second ledger that actually determines the sport's future, because a pipeline is built from participation, not from medals. This piece begins with a strange experience. Recently, working with a data set, I found that when the file opened there was almost nothing inside—every cell blank, marked simply not applicable. At first I thought it was my error. Then I understood: this is the true face of our sports archive. A database that returns no results is not an accident—it is the product of a decision. Now to the real work—what the numbers actually say. When I gather years of women's track-and-field results, one pattern keeps returning. At domestic meets, the number of women's heats is roughly half that of the men's. Electronic timing exists on a handful of tracks; everywhere else it is a stopwatch. And that hand-timing gap is the real trap. In a sprint, a hand clock and an electronic clock differ by roughly two to four tenths of a second. Which means the best time recorded beside a woman sprinter's name looks slower than her actual capacity. That slower number then excludes her from the national team, from stipends, from the front of the camera. Think of Shirin Akter, the national-record sprinter. If the time listed beside her name had been measured electronically, she might be closer to international qualification today. We took seconds away from her—not for her running, but for our timing method. The pattern does not stop at timing. On women's event entry lists you will see that a large share have no proper date of birth, no coach's name, no club name, and sometimes even a misspelled district. One empty cell breeds the next—because whoever builds the archive only carries forward the complete cells. So an entire schoolgirl's career vanishes into a blank row, and fifty years later no one can even find her name. I want to insist on one thing here. One hundred and twenty words can hold an entire career if you read them slowly. In June 2026, in Kuala Lumpur, the women's cricket team won the Asia Cup, Salma Khatun lifting the trophy—in the same week Russia 2026 kicked off. My paper gave that win a hundred and twenty words on page fourteen, while the World Cup got fourteen pages. I built a spreadsheet showing how mathematical, how helpless, that inequality is in words and column inches. It was shared four thousand times, and my editor gave me a weekly page. From that page I learned: you fight with numbers, not with sentiment. Notice another thing almost nobody writes about. The Bangladesh Athletics Federation's own record list is conspicuously incomplete. Some men's records survive decade after decade, with dates and venue names. But beside women's old records there is often no timing method at all—hand-timed or electronic, unknown. That uncertainty itself strips a woman athlete's achievement of credibility. Yet if we simply wrote down the method, at least we could compare like with like. Even in the electronic-results era we keep making one mistake. We assume that a modern clock makes a modern record. But a machine only measures time, not decisions. How many entries an event draws, how many qualify, whose name reaches the paper—these are human decisions. A new timing system can give a woman sprinter her correct time, but if the number of finals in her event does not grow, where will that time go? Technology is part of the solution, not the whole of it. Look at another number I have been gathering for years. In national-level stipends and prize money, the gap between male and female athletes is often two- to threefold. On paper it looks small, but across a career it decides who can keep a coach next season and who cannot. The athlete forced to stop training next year sees her results stall too—and that stalled result we later dismiss as a lack of talent. There is a bigger reason for this incompleteness that rarely gets discussed. On the domestic circuit, track, coaches, equipment and sponsorship are all essentially in the hands of three institutions: Army, Navy and BKSP. It is a kind of services duopoly, where entering after a certain age brings advantage and staying out leaves you at the margins. For women the door is narrower still, because where residential training centres lack separate security, hostels and coaches, why would parents send their daughters? So despite the talent, a girl is dropped before she ever enters the pipeline. When the stadiums emptied in 2026, this gap became clearer still. The women's football league was suspended, more than forty players went months without stipends, and nobody filed. I moved back to Barishal and spent eleven weeks on the phone with twenty-three women athletes across all eight divisions—from Shirin Akter to a sixteen-year-old high jumper in Barishal. Twice I drafted a resignation email. In the end a six-thousand-word piece emerged, called The Longest Lap. When the stadiums emptied, the longest lap was the one nobody timed. I decided then to write not for the desk but for the archive—first person, slow, keeping the audio of every interview. Every empty stadium now reads to me not as natural extinction but as evidence of institutional choice. And the highest price is paid by that schoolgirl who never reached BKSP—because her division has no synthetic track at all. Now to the uncomfortable part everyone discusses a little too comfortably. Everyone celebrates one name now—Imranur Rahman. Gold at the Asian Indoor Championships, a Paris wildcard. It is a genuinely big achievement, no doubt, and there is no reason to diminish it. But one thing must be said plainly: Imranur was born in England and runs while based in England. The problem is not him; it is how we tell the story. When a single England-based sprinter becomes the entire revival narrative, the absence of our domestic pipeline gets disguised as progress. And the biggest victim of that disguise is women—because where there is no path even for boys, we invent the myth that a path for girls has already been built. One talent is not a system; we must keep reminding ourselves of that. The second uncomfortable point is commercial value. Many say women's sport has fewer viewers, so it gets less investment. I say that is not the cause but the result. Audiences are built from broadcast, broadcast from archive, and archive from the data we refuse to write down. If a match result vanishes into a blank cell, fifty years later no one can find it—and its commercial value is zero too. Data and visibility are two sides of the same coin; neither works without the other. So what is the path? To me the answer is not complicated. First task—write it down. At every domestic meet, every event, record each girl's result with timing method, wind reading and club name, in a digital archive no one can erase. Second task—hold the federation accountable, not only for medals but for participation. Third task—build a track for that schoolgirl who still lives in a division without a single synthetic track. I know none of this happens overnight. The federation will not change, patronage will not arrive in one night, the paper's pages will not suddenly grow. But one thing I can say with certainty: a number you do not count will never speak for you. So I count, and I will keep counting. I follow women. — Root: Women.