No Records, Only Memory: Bangladeshi Swimming's Empty Ledger in the Blockchain Age

It is five in the morning at a Shitalakshya ghat. The mist is still unwilling to leave the river, and the water is grey. In my hand is that old stopwatch I have refused to round for three decades. In my pocket is a small notebook — district, coach, a swimmer's personal best. That morning I set out to do something that takes seconds in almost any other country: verify one swimmer's best time. I searched. I found it in the notebook, found it on the watch — but not in any database.

Sitting on the ghat, I asked myself how much we really count. If a country's swimming history lives only in people's mouths — not on paper, not in a file, nowhere — is it history, or is it rumour?

I took the beat nobody wanted, and it taught me where the real game lives. In 2026, when the fifth SAF Games came to Dhaka, the sports desk sent me to the outdoor pool at Mirpur because no senior reporter wanted swimming. When the television commentator fell ill, a producer put a microphone in my hand. I called a Bangladeshi breaststroker "touching second"; he had finished fourth, and the groan travelled across the deck. That night I sat in the stands asking strangers what they had actually seen. Then I spent a month with VHS tapes and a notebook. Since that month I have kept a lane card for every swimmer — district, river, coach, personal best — and I never call a placing before the touchpad confirms it.

The name Brojen Das still stirs something. He crossed the English Channel six times, training in the Buriganga — the river that now runs black with pollution past Dhaka. When he crossed in 2026, he showed the world that a boy from Bengal could swim. From there we built a single narrative: the river's son. But how much actual data lives inside that narrative?

After Mosharraf Hossain crossed the Channel in 2026, we waited 37 years. In 2026, the Sagor–Himel relay filled that void. I do not treat the 37-year gap as a curiosity — it is an administrative indictment. For 37 years nobody kept count, nobody planned, nobody built the next generation. Had they, we could say how many swimmers from which district were prepared for the Channel, how many dropped away in which year. We cannot. Because the data does not exist.

On the Shitalakshya I learned that a race is a long conversation between water and will. In 2026 I called the national long-distance race — roughly ten kilometres — from a country boat with a borrowed megaphone. No grandstand, no scoreboard, no touchpad: only a line of heads in brown water and spectators standing on the chars. Midway I stopped describing positions and started describing what ten kilometres of river does to a body. Afterwards I sat with a village swimming instructor who was counting the children her union had lost that monsoon. I understood then that the pool had been lying to me about where Bangladeshi swimming actually lives.

The river is the real arena. The roughly ten-kilometre race on the Dhaleshwari or the Shitalakshya is the most authentically Bangladeshi swimming event — and Brojen Das training in the Buriganga is its ancestral proof. Yet no central result of that race is preserved. Who won in which year, in what time, on which river — all of it travels by word of mouth and never reaches paper. Open-water swimming could be the identity we actually own; we have left that unaccounted for too.

Take 2026. The 11th SA Games came to Dhaka, and the outdoor pool at Mirpur filled with spectators. Mahfizur Rahman Sagor, then a teenager, took silver and bronze. I was calling from the deck, and I turned the microphone into a petition — Jewel Ahmed, holder of 35 national golds, was still waiting on reward money and a job. Listeners phoned in, day after day, asking why. For one month Bangladesh watched swimming. A full gallery can make a pool holy — that is what that month taught me.

But that month was the exception, not the rule. That is what troubles me most. We have kept 2026 as a memory, not as data. Sagor's silver second, the timing of that bronze — how many people can tell you today? There is no central database, no official split times, no preserved entry lists. Search for a national championship result three years later and it cannot be found.

The real question sits here. When we discuss Bangladeshi swimming's crisis, we say: no money, no pools, no coaches. All true. But before all that there is a problem we do not name: we do not keep count.

The country has one outdoor 50-metre pool, at Mirpur, more than four decades old. One international-standard water body for 170 million people. The bigger crisis is that we do not know what actually happened in that pool. Who swam what time, which record fell in which year, how a swimmer's improvement curve looked — there is no central record of any of it. At the National Championship the Navy finishes first, the Army second, BKSP third. I credit the Navy pipeline that produces national champions; but the harder question is why the civilian clubs meant to do the same cannot. This medal table is not a count of medals; it is a diagnosis. And if the results of that hollow system are not even preserved, how are we to see the hollowness?

International swimming has turned data into an industry. Per-50-metre splits, reaction times, stroke rates, dolphin-kick depth — everything is recorded, analysed, converted into coaching decisions. Some federations are working on blockchain-based fan tokens and digital tickets, and considering tamper-proof systems for records. I respect that enthusiasm. But our reality is different. Our problem is not digital; it is pre-digital. Blockchain secures data that exists; in our case the data itself is missing. Where there is nothing to keep, what does security technology do?

Consider what would happen if we kept proper records. Say we knew how fast a district swimmer goes in the 100-metre freestyle, how steep the improvement curve is, at what age they peak. Then we could say who will be ready for the Channel in four years, who will take an Olympic universality place, and who is genuinely on the merit-qualification path. Today we can say none of it, because there is no data to say it with. This silence is not merely a lack of information — it is a nation's failure to measure its own progress.

Let me take one simple example. Suppose someone wanted to know who Bangladesh's best 100-metre freestylers of the 1990s were. We have no reliable list to answer with. Yet in many neighbouring countries that list sits online, updated year after year.

And swimming, for us, is not a luxury — it is survival infrastructure. In this delta nation, roughly 40 children drown every day; that number is written in my notebook, beside names and dates. Learning to swim means living here. But which district has how many children learning to swim, which union loses how many, how far the death count falls when teaching expands — where is that account? SwimSafe-style programmes are running, and the people on the ground are working hard. But we have no instrument to measure their success. And work that cannot be measured cannot be funded.

We usually blame the swimmers, or the lack of money, or the government. I say the fault is far more fundamental. We have dreamed of turning a sport into a profession, but we never built the habit of keeping its books. If a national record stands still year after year — our best 50 metres sits roughly in the 24-to-26-second band, the 100 around 58 seconds — the question is whether that is the body's limit or the limit of our ignorance. We do not know which, because we have not measured properly. The honesty with the stopwatch is the only authority this beat ever gave me, and I do not want to lose it.

Our collective memory is trapped too. That one month of 2026 is our emotional home. As a gallery-fed man, I still hear the applause. But 2026 was the exception to be explained, not the standard to be mourned. Today's coverage could be compared against it — if the data existed. It does not. So we write nostalgia instead of history, and nostalgia has no split times.

Sagor and Himel's 2026 relay is our pride. Inside that pride there is a void. In the 37 years before that relay, how many swimmers trained for the Channel, how many were lost along the way, who paid their costs and who refused — nobody kept that ledger. In my notebook there is a file titled "owed to whom" — reward money, stipends, promised jobs. That file has grown for three decades, and it is still in my hand.

I want the first step to be the simplest. A national swimming database — every result, every split, the name and time of every swimmer in every district. Build it once and it serves generation after generation, and it will put those who have kept this sport outside the ledger for so long face to face with accountability. Whether the technology is blockchain or a paper notebook, the question is not technology but will. I never round my stopwatch. If the country had at least refused to round the books, we might by now know where we actually stand.