The Ledger That Never Disappears: From Sports Results Sheets to Blockchain

I still have a photograph of a carbon-copy results sheet from 2026. Sitting in the press tribune of the National Stadium in Dhaka, I filed nine dispatches in nine days that year, six of them on athletics. Shah Alam's victory in the men's 100 metres was the story that carried the whole SAF Games for Bangladesh. But three decades later, the document that matters most to me is not the win — it is the paper itself. Hand-timed, with not a single electronic timing device anywhere in the stadium, only carbon-copy sheets. That year roughly 140 journalists were accredited; three were women. That same week I started a personal ledger, copying every mark and every name by hand, filed by year. The first results sheet is never just paper; it is a doorway. By the 2026 SAF Games I was writing for The Daily Star. Mahbub Alam won the men's 100 metres — Bangladesh's fourth SAF Games sprint title, and nobody knew then that it would be the last. In the mixed zone, the medal meets the microphone and the only woman — that year, the only woman was me. A visiting coach told me, in English, that women do not read tactics. I answered with the results sheet. Over that meet I logged forty-seven athletics results, heats included, and wrote for the first time that the sprint pipeline actually ended at the services. From then on I stopped writing gold-medal stories and started writing supply stories — who runs the pipeline, who pays for it, who leaves. At Islamabad in 2026, Bangladesh won not a single athletics medal. At Colombo in 2026, Mahfuzur Rahman Mithu won the 110 metres hurdles, which remains the last SA Games athletics gold to this day. I was forty-three by then, and I had stopped waiting for press releases. I built the Mithu Line: a single spreadsheet of every Bangladeshi SA Games athletics medal since 2026 — four sprint golds, one hurdles gold, and the empty years left visibly blank. In 2026 a national daily finally ran that drought framing, eighteen years late. It is those empty cells that interest me now. Because the existence of data, the security of data and the truth of data are three entirely different things. Our problem was never truth; it was existence. A result that was never recorded cannot be brought back by any technology. And that is where blockchain enters the picture. Let me explain what blockchain actually is, in a sports journalist's language. It is a shared ledger — a digital record whose every entry is written across many computers at once. If someone wants to alter an old entry, they would have to alter every copy at the same instant, which is practically impossible. In other words, once information is written, it cannot be deleted or retroactively changed. The handwritten ledger I have kept all my life, filed by year, which nobody can alter — blockchain is essentially its digital version, spread across thousands of computers. Imagine if every official mark, every heat time, every doping-sample ID were written to a public ledger. Athletes, coaches, federations, journalists — everyone would see the same truth. If someone later claimed the time was wrong, or that the gold belonged to someone else, the ledger would have the final word. In doping this matters even more: when the sample was taken, who transported it, which lab it went to, when the result came — if the entire chain of custody is written immutably, then there is no room for excuses like the sample was spoiled or the record cannot be found. My handwritten ledger had one great limitation: it stayed only with me. If I left, or if insects ate the files, everything was gone. That is blockchain's advantage — truth does not depend on one person's goodwill, but on the structure of the system. A stopwatch can start a career, but a ledger decides what it meant. Lately I have watched European clubs and leagues use blockchain — fan tokens, ticketing, multimedia rights. Those are commercial uses. But the core crisis in sport is not commercial; it is documentary. If a club issues a fan token yet does not preserve every age-group mark from its youth academy, that is a misuse of the technology. Because the youth pipeline is precisely where the most information is lost — the best season of a sixteen-year-old is written down nowhere, and two years later, when he moves up to the senior side, there is no proof his childhood ever happened. There is another area where an immutable ledger could genuinely help — transfers and contracts. How many times a young athlete changed clubs, who received the training compensation, this accounting is often a tangle on paper. Especially for boys and girls moving from small leagues to big clubs. A transparent ledger would at least show who truly invested behind them, and who simply arrived at the last moment to harvest the crop. I once had a strange experience in my research. I asked a federation for the data of an entire meet, and what came back was a blank file — a title, a date, but no entries inside. The paper itself seemed to admit that nothing had been recorded. That blank file became one of my most valuable documents, because it showed how deep the drought ran. If a digital system also returns empty today, it means the system is working — there is simply nothing inside to enter. Technology cannot hide emptiness; it only makes emptiness visible. I have seen many times that after a record falls, everyone talks about the new number, but nobody asks where the old number was written down. I can still retrieve all forty-seven entries from 2026, because they were written by hand. But the zero from Islamabad in 2026 is on no list, because nobody writes down a zero. That is exactly why an immutable ledger is needed — one that writes down the zero as well. But here is the real question: who writes? Who runs the pipeline? In the eight divisional cities of my country, children still run on dirt and grass tracks; the only synthetic track worth the name is in Dhaka. Where is the electronic timing there? If there is no electronic timing at the track itself, how reliable is a hand-timed mark before it even reaches the ledger? Blockchain stores information, but it does not create it. Where the instrument is absent, the ledger will simply preserve empty cells with perfect fidelity. This is my core observation. There is a gap between authentication technology and the infrastructure of data collection, and countries like ours sit inside that gap. Blockchain is an extremely strong lock, but a lock does not turn an empty safe into gold. Many will say blockchain will end every irregularity in sport at once. I am cautious. Suppose a federation enters a training mark of its best athlete into the ledger, one never verified at any official meet. The ledger will make it immortal, but not true. Immutability and truth are not the same thing — a false entry made immutable becomes a more dangerous falsehood, because now nobody can even correct it. I also want to take the strongest argument on the federations' side. Limited budgets, limited staff, athletes scattered across sixty-four districts — in these conditions, digitising every mark is not easy work. Often a federation has neither a track nor a coach. But the problem is that this same excuse has produced the same empty cells for three decades. If the technology stays only in the hands of a few people sitting at the centre, while the field staff cannot use it, then the ledger will remain an ornament, not justice. So the final question is not about technology, but about will. Do we want a ledger in which no result is lost — and who will take responsibility for writing it, the central federation, or that coach still standing on a dirt track with a stopwatch in hand? My handwritten ledger does not know the answer. But every empty cell still throws the same question.