The Empty Columns: What 'N/A' Actually Means in Indian Athletics

Thirteen columns sat on my desk. Nine of them said N/A.

It was not a corrupted file. It was the complete official record of a domestic meet — date, name, event, mark. Everything else was blank: wind speed, altitude above sea level, track type, round, reaction time, splits. The thing I had been calling a "result" for thirty-five years was really half a sentence.

That evening one thing became clear: the biggest deficiency in Indian athletics is not what is written in the record book; it is what was never written at all. I had gone looking for a number and found a system wearing it.

At the international level, a performance counts as "complete" only when six things are attached to it — mark, wind, date, venue, round and weather. The World Athletics record-ratification guideline is explicit that for the 200m and shorter sprints and for horizontal jumps, the following wind must not exceed +2.0 metres per second; the ratification form asks for the anemometer's model, its placement and the date of calibration. Altitude above sea level (generally above 1000m) must be recorded, because thin air helps sprints and jumps and penalises distance races. In the era of carbon-plated shoes, the shoe model has become part of the file too.

For domestic meets in India, that form was never filled with that rigour. At district and state level an anemometer is a luxury, electronic timing is rented equipment, and the technical delegate is often simply the organiser's acquaintance. After 2026, when the Target Olympic Podium Scheme tied funding to marks, that technical emptiness became a financial question. Earlier, an incomplete record was only a weakness of history. Now an incomplete record decides who gets six months of training abroad and who does not. Somewhere between the stopwatch and the spreadsheet, a career is decided.

In July 2026, in Bydgoszcz, Neeraj Chopra threw the javelin 86.48m and set a junior world record. Why did that record stand? Because the file was complete — date, stadium, weather, the javelin's weight and its certificate, all logged. The following year, at the Asian Championships at Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, his 85.23m gold was logged the same way. Across those four days I entered 214 Indian performances onto my own sheet. That was the first time I saw clearly that athletes who had a big stadium and the full machinery behind them had full files; everyone else's file shrank to a name and a mark.

The long jump shows this even more plainly. August 2026, Paris: Anju Bobby George won World Championships bronze with 6.83m, India's first World Championships medal in athletics. The wind reading on that jump mattered as much as the medal; a jump inside +2.0 counts, one outside does not. One reading made the medal valid.

In a relay, splits are not decoration — they are evidence. The women's 4x400m relay at the 2026 Commonwealth Games and Asian Games is the clearest illustration. After the bans confirmed by CAS in 2026, the questions that arose were answered not by the stopwatch but by paperwork — the sample chain, the supplement declarations, the testing dates. The medals that stood, stood; only the confirmed bans deserve mention. The lesson is single: where a meet's splits and testing records are incomplete, separating truth from suspicion afterwards becomes impossible. That era can be called neither wholly golden nor wholly fraudulent.

Look at the opposite case: 2026. In Los Angeles, P.T. Usha finished fourth in the 400m hurdles in 55.42 seconds; bronze went at 55.41 — one hundredth of a second. We know that hundredth because the electronic timing and photo-finish file of that meet were complete. Respect means audit, and an audit is possible only when the paper exists. Placing Usha on a podium she never stood on is not respect; it is an inherited error.

November 2026, AFI offices at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. Uwe Hohn had gone, Neeraj's season had been cut short by elbow surgery, and the federation was negotiating with the German biomechanist Klaus Bartonietz. Most people at the time were writing personality pieces. I pulled the TOPS funding file and the NIS Patiala camp order, and was first to report the two-year contract's structure and its camp-attachment clause. Indian athletics has no transfer window; what it has is a contract. And that contract is not entered in any record book.

Neeraj's file can be read because it is complete. 86.48 (2026, junior world record), 85.23 (2026, Bhubaneswar), 86.47 (2026, Gold Coast), 87.58 (2026, Tokyo), 89.94 (2026, Stockholm, personal best), 88.17 (2026, Budapest), 89.45 (2026, Paris silver). Two Julys, one athlete, and the full arithmetic in between — this can be assembled only because every link carries a date, a venue and a wind reading.

Compare that with the domestic discus thrower whose file has nine N/As. We do not know whether she moved from 58m to 61m through improvement or through a strong wind. We do not know whether she was returning from injury or in form. And therefore we do not know whether she should have a place in TOPS. The empty column is not a technical defect; it is a decision.

The Olympic door opens from two sides — the direct qualifying standard and World Ranking points. For Neeraj the first route was easy. Kishore Jena's 87.54m opened the second route in 2026. For an athlete whose file is incomplete, even accumulating ranking points is harder, because the points rest on the technical data recorded at those same meets.

Here is the counter-intuitive argument, and the most uncomfortable part of this whole reckoning.

We assume N/A means "information unavailable". In practice N/A often means "money was not spent gathering the information". Buying an anemometer, getting it calibrated, deploying a technical delegate at every meet, hiring electronic timing for splits — these are all budget lines. A federation that cuts these lines is saying nothing about athletics; it is saying everything about its priorities.

The second point matters more: the absence of a doping stain in a record is not proof of a clean record. An athlete tested twice in twelve months will show no red flag — because the tests needed to raise a flag never happened. Do not read emptiness as exoneration. Where there is no evidence there is no finding; and where there is no finding, do not assume a pass.

Third, the medal-table triumph. In July 2026 at Kalinga, India topped the Asian Championships medal table for the first time — 29 medals, 12 gold. Splendid. But after a home track, a home crowd and the state of that year's files, one question remains: of those 29 medals, how many have a complete technical record that can still be retrieved today? Depth is measured not by counting medals but by the documented process behind them.

And it is easy to write "stalled" after looking at 89.94. The harder question is how much depth sits behind him — Jena's 87.54, and how many names beneath that hold a mark above 85. A round number is easy to read; depth takes work to measure. The javelin belt tells the same story: Panipat's akhada lineage and imported biomechanics together built a production line, while Kerala's middle-distance conveyor kept running on a school and a coaching lineage. Population does not draw the map; access does. Whoever got the facility to be measured got into the record.

The next audit will not be of athletes. It will be of the archive.

On 24 March 2026 the Tokyo postponement was announced, NIS Patiala shut its gates, the Federation Cup was cancelled, and my calendar went blank for eleven months. In those months I digitised 1,100 meet files — the 2026 Asian Games programme, PTI result clippings, AFI annual reports, and the splits from Milkha Singh's 46.6-second 440 yards at Cardiff in 2026. Every entry checked twice. In the same period I tracked the Potchefstroom camp from six thousand kilometres away, reading nothing but federation camp circulars.

That archive taught me something no press release did: a stadium remembers what a press release forgets — provided someone wrote it down. The ledger never closes; it only changes hands. Today that ledger sits with people who are treating N/A as information and moving on.

The question is not whether India has talent. The question is whether, the next time someone throws 61 metres, we will have the evidence to say how strong the wind was.