The Immutable Ledger: Women's Athletics' Missing Records and the Promise of Blockchain

One morning in 2026, sitting in the press gallery of the National Stadium, I took the results sheet of the National Athletics Championships in my hands. Twenty-two pages, sixty-two finals, handwritten times alongside. The next morning I opened the Dhaka dailies. Of those sixty-two, nine were reported, and only three of them were women's events. I counted the other half too, and the number kept rewriting itself.

That number has left one question circling in my head for years: if we cannot even preserve what actually happened, who will testify in the future that those sixty-two finals ever took place? If no time, no ledger, no archive carries a trace, it is treated as though it never happened in history. That question is what now pushes me to step back from the athletics track and look toward technology — specifically blockchain, which once was invoked only in talk of cryptocurrency.

Bangladesh's record-keeping crisis in athletics is not new. In the 1980s we fondly remember Shah Alam's SAF Games sprint gold, but those times were hand-timed and scribbled into paper ledgers. Electronic timing arrived much later. That means the same race, two different measuring systems. Old and new times cannot be compared side by side, because the method of measurement itself changed. We keep forgetting this simple fact, and then we begin to treat a hand-timed mark as the equal of a modern record.

On top of this comes geographic inequality. How many of the country's eight divisions have a synthetic track? A handful. The fastest girl in Barishal, Rangpur or Mymensingh must first come to Dhaka or a BKSP camp to run at national level. The road is long, it costs money, it needs the family's permission and a place to stay. Many talents vanish on that road — leaving no trace in any time, any score sheet, any archive.

The picture in educational institutions is bleaker still. School and college competitions are held, but where are the results stored? Mostly nowhere. Perhaps in a teacher's notebook; the next year that too is lost. So we never know whether the sixteen-year-old girl who ran 100 metres in 12.4 seconds today will still be in the national team five years from now, or will have left the sport under the pressure of studies and family.

This data void is my deepest concern. In 2026, when the pandemic emptied the stadiums, I moved back to Barishal and spent eleven weeks on the phone with twenty-three women athletes across all eight divisions — from national-record sprinter Shirin Akter to a sixteen-year-old high jumper in Barishal. The piece that emerged from those conversations, 'The Longest Lap', taught me this above all: these athletes barely exist in our archives.

So the question arises: what can technology do to protect this lost information? This is where blockchain becomes relevant. Blockchain is essentially a distributed, immutable digital ledger. Once something is written, it is almost impossible to erase or secretly alter, because each entry is cryptographically linked to the previous one. And it is stored not in one place but across many computers — so even if a central office closes, the ledger survives.

Imagine this: if every final's result from the national championships — time, wind speed, athlete's name, date of birth, district, coach — entered an immutable ledger? No one could later erase it. Let the federation leadership change, let a sponsor walk away, let a newspaper close — the information would remain. Data is valuable only when it is verifiable and permanent. If a schedule exists only in a federation file, it can vanish in an instant. But if it lives on a distributed ledger, it can be verified, and no one has to be trusted.

When I wrote the women's-athletics feature 'Waking up after decades of hibernation' for The Daily Star in 2026, I felt this problem even more deeply. Searching for old schedules, I saw how many results survive only on old newspaper pages — not in any central archive. If a newspaper closes, or an archive subscription ends, that record is at risk too. Here the practical advantage of blockchain is clear: once an entry is added, it stays the same for ages.

This system offers two more possibilities. First, the timestamp. If date and time attach automatically to every result, no one can later claim, 'when was this time actually recorded'. Second, smart contracts. Suppose a rule were written into the ledger itself that a national record broken automatically releases a scholarship or award — then no one in the middle could stall it with a decision.

Internationally the idea is not unfamiliar. In the sports world, blockchain has been experimented with in fan tokens, ticketing, and digital collectibles. But my interest is not there. My interest is lower down — where no one looks. How to keep the data that no one writes down is the real question. In June 2026, at the Asia Cup in Kuala Lumpur, Bangladesh's women beat India by three wickets to win the title, with Salma Khatun lifting the trophy. That very week the Russia World Cup began, and our newspapers printed that historic win on page 14 in just 120 words, while the World Cup got fourteen pages. I read those 120 words slowly — because one hundred and twenty words can hold an entire career, if you read them slowly.

This is where my doubt begins, and I do not want the praise of blockchain to bury that doubt. Blockchain is a ledger. A ledger does not tell the truth — it only records what it is told. If an institution decides not to time the schoolgirl, the ledger stays empty. An immutable empty ledger is also a kind of defeat, only more permanent this time. And if false information enters once, it enters forever; the immutability of error is itself the warning.

We make this mistake often: we treat technology as the solution, when the problem was the will. In 2026, when I was counting the results sheet, the problem was not technology — it was the lack of a pen and a decision. Blockchain does not make decisions; it is only the tool that executes them. So the real question is whether there is the will to write.

There is another trap — commercialisation. These days we often see women's sport as a market too — sponsors, audiences, fan tokens. But the true value of women's athletics lies in its sporting excellence, not its market price. If blockchain is used only to make digital souvenirs for fans, and not to preserve records, who benefits? That is the old story again — loud noise, empty stadium. As a sports writer I have seen repeatedly that institutions adopt technology before the audience, but never go behind the field to look for talent.

Yet I am hopeful, because change has begun, however slowly. Electronic timing is gradually entering Bangladeshi athletics. Digital results management is no longer imagination. The question now is only who will decide which information is worth preserving. Technology has handed us an opportunity: a ledger that cannot forget. But who gets written into that ledger, which athlete's name enters and whose does not — that decision is ours, the federation's, the media's.

When the stadiums emptied, the longest lap was the one nobody timed. Whether technology can time that lap is now the question. The bigger question is whether we want to time it at all.

I follow women. — Root: Women.