Where the Splits Are Never Filed: Excavating the 'N/A' in Indian Athletics

On a December morning, a zonal meet results sheet sat in front of me. 400 metres, boys' category, first place — 49.8 seconds. Age sixteen. Beside the name, just three words: hand-timed. Every other column was blank. No wind reading, no reaction time, no second-round split, no coach's name, and no record of which ground the boy had run on.

I closed the sheet and added one more page to that file. On it, a single word: N/A.

I have done this work for twenty years — finding the athletes the federation has not yet announced. What I have learned in those twenty years is that a blank column is never neutral. It is a decision someone else made on my behalf.

Consider what that sheet actually does. In Indian athletics, a young athlete's career is decided by three things — selection trials, camp time and a job. Prize money arrives last. The real contract is an appointment letter from Railways, Services, the police or a public-sector unit, plus a small TOPS office attached to it. The route to that office runs through a file. The athlete whose file carries splits, wind readings and a coach's name sits higher on the list that gets read in Patiala. The athlete whose file is empty stays a bracket mark on that same list.

For a sixteen-year-old, a Khelo India scholarship means that for the next two years nobody at home will ask why she is leaving school. A fourth-place finish means a Railways posting has shifted a year into the future. Both outcomes are decided in the same corner of the results sheet where the mark is written — and the sheet never says so.

The inequality is built in from the start. At the Nationals, the AFI publishes a full results series — wind, lane, photo finish, the lot. Below that, at district and zonal level, the same race is entered in a register by a schoolteacher holding a stopwatch. SAI centres have a physio, a weight room, sometimes a lactate meter; not every centre has an anemometer. Since the day I began scouting, that gap has sat inside my model like a permanent error term.

One case stays with me. Guntur, 2026, National Inter-State. A sixteen-year-old from Panipat, Rohit Yadav, threw the javelin 72.45 metres. Numerically it was a modest mark; in a senior grid it draws no attention. But the angle of his elbow and the speed at release held something the sheet did not record, and I had to rewind the tape again and again to see it.

This is where my real difficulty begins. I am a numbers man, but I have also learned that a number never recorded is not a number — it is an inference, and a career built on inference is a gamble.

Four things are compulsory alongside any sprint or jump mark before it can enter a trajectory model. First, wind speed: a mark with a tailwind above +2.0 metres per second is invalid for records and equally invalid for modelling. Second, altitude: venues roughly a thousand metres above sea level hand sprinters and jumpers a few hundredths for free and penalise distance runners in reverse. Third, the timing method: hand timing and photo finish are conventionally separated by about 0.24 seconds, and in the 400 metres that gap changes an entire round. Fourth, reaction time: without it you cannot tell whether the boy ran fast or merely started early.

In my files, on average, one of those four is present.

So I made myself a rule: if two of the four columns are empty, I downgrade the mark one grade and attach a note that it is unverifiable. The rule does not make me popular. It keeps me honest.

In the relay, the gap is far more expensive, because a relay mark belongs not to four athletes but to three handoffs. Jakarta, 2026, Asian Games, men's 4x400. On the third leg ran a nineteen-year-old named Amoj Jacob — a 45.6-second split, which at that age is a different category of fact. But his exchange with the anchor stumbled, and on my pad it became roughly 0.8 seconds of loss. The team stopped at 3:01.85. With clean handoffs, the same four men sit near 3:00.9. The Jakarta relay did not fail at the baton; it failed in the silence between legs.

That is why I read a relay not as a race but as an organisational map. Whether all four were in camp together, on what basis the trials were run, how many hours went into the exchange zone — none of that lives in the results sheet. So when I watch a relay I do not watch the clock; I watch how many times the third-leg runner was actually paired with the anchor. What looks like a breakdown is often a missing handoff in the dark.

In the javelin the problem takes another shape. Here the mark speaks least and release speed speaks most. After that evening in Panipat I placed Rohit's junior numbers into a trajectory model against Neeraj Chopra's 2026 junior world record of 86.48 metres. The model ranked him a top-five prospect. But the model contained one column I had not filled myself: training surface. I kept digging at Panipat until the fragments made a player, and still that column stayed empty. Three years later it spoke loudest.

Lockdown, 2026. Rohit was training on hard ground in Panipat and wrecked his ankle. I was sitting alone in Chennai, re-watching old meet tapes and realising that my model contained the athlete but not his environment. Injury is a site, not a verdict. Since that year every report of mine carries a column no federation asks for: what surface, what shoes, and whose supervision the athlete is training under. In the javelin the risk sits in the elbow and shoulder rather than the hamstring, so there I track the consistency of elbow angle month to month — whether it holds, or shifts with every new coach.

I run one more test annually, a progression anomaly check. If an athlete's personal best jumps more than three times his historical annual average in a single year, I do not celebrate; I get suspicious. The suspicion is not an accusation of doping but a demand for verification: where was the mark set, on which ground, in what wind, and who was present that day. I look for the layer beneath the stats, where character leaves its sediment. Because a prospect is never one highlight; it is a stratigraphy of small choices.

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it cuts against my own trade.

We assume that the more complete an athlete's data, the more trustworthy the athlete. My experience says the reverse. The completeness of a file describes a family's income, not an athlete's quality. The child with a private academy, an overseas-trained coach and a separate man for video analysis gets a clean file. The child whose mother is a nurse at the district hospital and who runs at five in the morning on the mud of a government stadium gets three N/A columns. If I build my shortlist only from complete files, I reproduce the very inequality sport was designed to flatten.

The second inversion: more data is not the answer. I have seen athletes with weekly GPS load logs who lost their technique entirely by changing coaches three times in three years. And I have seen javelin throwers with no wind-verified mark at all whose elbow angle has not moved in four seasons, because nobody replaced their coach.

That is my real worry. We read absence of data as absence of risk. The sheet says N/A and the committee reads a green light. N/A does not mean no risk; it means nobody looked. And an unseen risk is more dangerous than a known one, because it leaves no record to audit later.

The next time you see a seventeen-year-old girl's 400-metre result with nothing but a time beside her name, do not ask how fast she is. Ask what the wind was doing, who stopped the watch, and who her coach was.

My modest demand is five compulsory columns on every district results sheet: timing method, wind, surface, coach's name, and a permanent athlete address. The public cost is trivial; one anemometer is cheaper than one pair of premium spikes.

Twenty years from now, nobody reviewing this generation will ask who won that season. They will ask whom we recorded and whom we did not. The best scouts do not predict the future; they recover what others buried.