The Empty Column: How Missing Data Undermines East African Women's Athletics

In the archive room of the athletics federation in Nairobi, I once leafed through a mimeographed women's championship results booklet gone yellow at the edges. Times were recorded. Names were recorded. Placings were recorded. But along the right margin of every page, the wind column sat empty from the first sheet to the last, and nobody on that year's organising committee thought it needed filling in.

I am used to gaps of that kind. Thirty-eight dust-covered pages of a diary in the Kenya football federation's storeroom once taught me that a refused interview can also be a doorway. The empty column on an athletics results sheet belongs to a different species: it is not the silence of a person but the silence of a record-keeping system. Systems do not fall silent out of modesty. They fall silent by default.

Athletics lives on the provenance of every mark. A time is worth something only when you know the conditions that produced it: whether the wind exceeded the legal limit of +2.0 m/s set by World Athletics, whether the track sits above 1,000 m of altitude, whether the shoe carried a carbon plate and a sole up to the 40 mm cap applied to road shoes from 2026, and what the 200 m splits say about how the effort was distributed. Nairobi sits at roughly 1,795 m. Every mark run here needs a line of altitude context, or it is merely a handsome quantity rather than a real capacity.

At the same time, the selection architecture of the sport demands clean data. Entry to major championships runs along two paths — the qualifying standard and the world ranking — plus a quota of three athletes per country. For a country with Kenya's depth in the women's 3,000 m steeplechase, that quota turns domestic selection into the hardest meet of the year. To understand who was left out and why, you need lap-by-lap data. Without it, the selection story degrades into rumour wearing a technical coat.

And this is where I began to think my own trade has a problem. Ten years of covering women's meetings in East Africa have taught me that most results sheets from small competitions are now digitised, with every field present: name, age, club, time, notes. Many of those fields are blank. The sheet is valid. The content is empty.

A dataset that is formally complete but substantively empty is the most dangerous failure in sports journalism, because it clears every inspection while carrying no information at all. Data engineers call it a silent pipeline failure: the output matches the schema and misses the point. For a writer like me it arrives as a report with a headline, a source, a meet name, and not one verifiable detail.

The harm lies in how an empty cell behaves. It refuses to stay put. In a newsroom, a blank field is usually filled with one of two things: the writer's guess, or the reader's excitement. A young athlete who runs fast at a meeting with no wind gauge gets pushed up into a phenomenon; when she meets a headwind at a meeting with proper standards, the conclusion is that her form has collapsed. Both conclusions are wrong. The error belongs neither to the athlete nor to the stopwatch, but to the fact that we never had the data to say anything in the first place.

The empty cell also behaves in the opposite direction, no less dangerously. A file with no doping finding is easily read as a clean file. In athletics those two sentences sit worlds apart. No anomaly on the biological passport, no missed whereabouts filing, no result from a ten-year stored sample — all of that means something only if somebody actually went and checked. Absence of data is not evidence of innocence. It is only absence of data.

The same gap opens on the contract side. A Kenyan woman athlete moving to a European management stable is usually announced with a figure and a congratulatory line. The structure of the terms, the duration, the image rights, the release clause, who pays for injury treatment — almost never stated. The fan receives a figure. The writer receives a gap. By the next transfer window, when the athlete has vanished from the start lists, nobody can explain why.

I have nothing against data. I object to using data as a ritual. Analysts now walk into the locker room with spreadsheets in hand, and their conclusions are often arithmetically right and rhythmically wrong: they do not know that an athlete can be two seconds slower because she walked four kilometres to the training ground that morning. That does not appear in any column.

The most counterintuitive part: the industry's largest error is not the fabricated mark but the blank cell left alone so long that people forget it was ever blank. A fake mark will be checked by somebody and overturned. A blank cell will not be checked, because checking nothing is work nobody wants.

I still ask myself whose voice I am writing, each time I sit down with a sheet like that. On the feet of the women athletes I have followed for ten years, I see a whole generation that has never been named — and part of the reason they have never been named is that their files are not thick enough to name them. An empty stadium still echoes, but an echo needs a loudspeaker made of paperwork. We have not built that loudspeaker.

The work required is small. A hard rule for every sprint results sheet: no wind column, no published mark. A mandatory line in every transfer story: who pays, for how long, for what. A convention for every doping story: when there is no finding, say there is no finding, and do not let readers convert it into clean.

Whenever someone tells me East African women's athletics lacks talent, I think of that empty column in the old Nairobi results booklet. Talent is not what is missing. What is missing is the space we never filled in on paper.