When the Data Sheet Returns N/A: Who Erased East African Women Athletes from Athletics History?

I reopened the analysis sheet at two in the morning Nairobi time. The performance column returned N/A. The qualifying status column returned N/A. The personal-best progression curve returned N/A. The age-curve position returned N/A. Fourteen rows of data. Twenty-three cells. Not a single real number. And the striking thing was that I was not surprised.

After twenty-five years watching tracks, I have grown used to this scene: a woman athlete steps out, runs flat out, crosses the line, and vanishes from every record system within forty-eight hours. My analysis sheet is not broken. It is reflecting an uncomfortable truth: nobody wrote it down. The data is missing not because she did not run, but because nobody sat down to write.

An empty data sheet is not a technical error. It is an editorial decision repeated long enough to become habit, and long enough to become structure.

I first saw this in 2026, when I launched the podcast Soka La Wanawake in Nairobi. Back then I thought I was building a programme about Kenyan women's football. I was wrong. I was building a programme about silence. Whenever I asked a colleague about match data for a women's game, the default answer was always: there isn't any. No footage. No match report. No possession stats. Just a photo and a scoreline.

The sheet I stared at that night is a mirror of an entire industry. It is empty because the input was empty. And the input was empty because nobody was paid to fill it.

When I checked the sheet against my own records from the 2026-2026 season, the gap appeared as clearly as a touchline: the Kenyan women's teams I tracked had roughly ten times less data than men's teams at the same level. Not ten times worse in ability. Ten times fewer people writing.

East Africa does not lack women's football or athletics talent; East Africa lacks record-keepers.

Context: a history of neglect as deliberate staging

To understand how an East African women's athletics data sheet can be this empty, you have to trace how the industry was built.

From the 1970s, as waves of Kenyan, Ethiopian, and Tanzanian athletes entered international competition, the media machinery around them was designed on an implicit assumption: viewers do not care about the competitive detail of women's events. They only care about the story.

Stories are cheap. Detail is expensive.

An article about a barefoot girl running out of a poor village takes half an hour to write. An analysis of how an athlete distributes her first three hundred metres, handles the bend, and kicks over the final four hundred takes three days of measurement and a video system that no women's meet in East Africa can afford.

So the industry chose the cheap option. And cheap, repeated for twenty years, became the standard.

When I first walked into the press room of an international athletics meet, I realised I was the second woman in the room. The first was a logistics officer. I asked a male coach about the split strategy of his female athlete. He looked at me as if I had asked about the orbital data of a satellite. He said: she runs on instinct. I wrote that quote down verbatim in my notebook. It was the most common answer I received throughout my first year on the job.

Instinct is the word people use when nobody bothers to measure. Nobody measures because nobody asks. Nobody asks because nobody is paid to ask. That chain feeds itself. And the result, after decades, is a blank sheet with N/A in fourteen categories.

When the 2026 World Cup took place in Russia, I was granted accreditation thanks to the reputation built by my podcast. Across all sixty-four matches, I ran a covert survey. I logged the percentage of commentary time European broadcasters devoted to tactical detail versus superstars and beautiful goals. The result: six per cent tactics, ninety-four per cent emotion.

And that was the number for men's football, where data is abundant. That means even with full numbers available, people still choose storytelling. For women's sport, where numbers were never collected, there is no choice at all. Only story. And story, as I said, is cheap.

That same year, the Women's Africa Cup of Nations ran in parallel without a single international broadcaster carrying it live. I sat alone in a room, watched amateur footage sent by contributors, and wrote down everything I could. A twelve-part series comparing possession, passing, and fouls-conceded data between African women's teams and men's teams at the World Cup reached 2.1 million impressions. But that mattered less than another outcome: the Football Kenya Federation invited me as a communications adviser.

I accepted. But I understood exactly what I was accepting. I was accepting a job that should have been done thirty years earlier.

Core analysis: the architecture of a gap

Here, let me do what I do best: dissect the emptiness.

In athletics, data does not generate itself. It is produced through a five-link chain. The first link is high-speed footage. The second is an automated split-timing system. The third is an operator who can read the numbers. The fourth is an editor who knows enough to choose which numbers to publish. The fifth is an outlet patient enough to publish them.

In East Africa, for women's meets, the first link usually disappears. No high-speed footage. No finish-line camera. No calibrated wind gauge. When the first link collapses, the next four become meaningless automatically. And the N/A begins falling onto the sheet like rain.

I spent three months in 2026 testing this. I contacted twelve sports outlets in the region with the same question: in your most recent women's season, how many metres of footage do you have archived? The median answer was: none. Some had photos. Some had short clips posted to social media. None had raw footage.

For men's meets at the same tier, the median was thirty-two metres of archived footage per match.

That gap cannot be explained by budget. It is explained by priority order.

And here is what few people realise: a data gap is not neutral. It has a shape. It favours certain kinds of story and erases others. Without split data, you cannot tell the story of an athlete who distributes pace intelligently. You can only tell the story of an athlete who runs fast. And the story of the fast runner, repeated for twenty years, turns East African women athletes into biological machines rather than tacticians.

I call this the transformation from subject to object. African women athletes are looked at, not watched. People look at her body, her speed, the village she came from. They do not watch how she makes a decision over the final two hundred metres. Because there is no data that would let them watch.

Tactical archaeology: the hand-made notebook

In March 2026, every international meet was suspended indefinitely.

I spent the first three weeks sitting in frustration. The women's World Cup was postponed. Regional meets were postponed. Every competition window closed. Then I realised I was wasting a rare opportunity: for the first time in my career, I had time to search for what the calendar never let me find.

I began collecting amateur footage from the phones of twelve women's clubs in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Not professional footage. Vertical clips, shaky clips, clips cut off exactly as the ball hit the net. But enough for me to see what the naked eye in the stands never sees.

And I found something that made me sit up straight.

Nine of the eleven East African women goalkeepers I reached during lockdown had hand-written their own tactical notebooks. Paper notebooks. Cardboard covers. Handwriting. One had logged every set-piece her opponent had taken over three seasons. One had drawn her own positioning when her team was caught on the counter. One had noted how a particular striker leaned her body before shooting.

I have studied male goalkeepers for years. I had never seen this behaviour in them at an equivalent frequency.

This does not mean women goalkeepers are better. It means resource scarcity — no video analysis, no data analyst, no pricey software — forced women athletes to invent their own systems. They built what nobody would build for them.

I wrote a forty-page report called The Invisible Tacticians. In it, I logged every small detail the record system had skipped: how one goalkeeper adjusted her defensive line with her eyes, how one defender shifted two steps before the ball arrived, how one midfielder kept pressing rhythm with her voice.

That report was adopted into the curriculum of a British university. But the thing I remember most is not the academic credit. It is the feeling of holding a cardboard notebook belonging to a twenty-one-year-old goalkeeper in Kisumu. She did not know she was doing science. She was simply trying to survive on the pitch.

And the system, because nobody wrote it down, called her instinctive.

Numbers and facts placed in the wrong column

Now let me return to the sheet at two in the morning.

I want to be clear about one thing regarding N/A. In sports data analysis, N/A is not zero. Zero is a number. N/A is the absence of the ability to measure at all. It is a statement that: we do not even qualify to begin asking.

When an analysis sheet about a woman athlete returns N/A in fourteen categories, it is not saying she has no achievements. It is saying she has no representation in the system.

This is the most insidious mechanism of media injustice. It does not lie. It simply says nothing. And silence, as I have written, is a tactic. But the silence here is not individual cowardice. It is an organisational decision, repeated long enough to look natural.

Look at the chain of cause and effect.

No automated splits means you cannot know whether an athlete ran the first three hundred metres fast or slow. Not knowing that means you cannot analyse pace distribution. Without pace analysis, you can only write the final result. Writing only the final result makes coverage repeat across matches. Repeated coverage makes viewers bored. Bored viewers make sponsors leave. Sponsors leaving means no money for footage.

The loop closes. And in the middle of that loop stands a twenty-two-year-old woman athlete, silent, with an N/A sheet pinned to her name.

On the transfer map, women are numbers placed in the wrong column. I said that and I stand by it. In women's football, a player who scores twenty-three goals in a season can still be valued at a fraction of a male player who scores ten at the same level. The reason is not technical. The reason is the data column. People only price what they see. And people only see what they measure.

When I said on radio in 2026 that the pressing model of Kenyan women's teams outperformed men's teams at the same level, two conservative journalists called it a joke. I did not dodge. I sat them down, opened footage of Vihiga Queens, and asked them to count with me. The women's sides I tracked scored twenty-three goals from high pressing in 2026-2026, while the Kenya men's national team scored only fourteen in the same manner.

They went quiet afterwards. Not because they were persuaded. Because they had never had a data sheet to argue with.

And here is my biggest lesson about the power of data. Data does not merely record reality. Data creates the hierarchy of what counts as worth discussing. Whoever controls the data column controls the entire conversation.

The invisible tacticians are not a metaphor. They are concrete people. They write notebooks with cardboard covers. They adjust defensive lines with their voices. They were never measured, so they became invisible. And being invisible, they were called instinctive.

Contrarian angle: commercial value and the market's blind spot

Here I want to challenge my own audience.

The prevailing argument about women's sport is this: to be cared about, it must have viewers. To have viewers, it must have quality. To have quality, it must wait longer.

This argument is wrong because it assumes audiences exist independently of recording infrastructure. They do not. Audiences are produced by infrastructure. You cannot be a fan of an athlete if you have no way to follow her progression season by season. You cannot debate a team's tactics if you have no data to debate with.

In East Africa, I have observed a striking consequence of this. When my podcast began broadcasting detailed analysis of women's matches, with specific numbers, listenership rose rather than fell. Audiences are not alien to analysis. They were simply never given access to it in women's sport.

Demand does not disappear. It migrates. Fans of East African women's football still follow European men's clubs, because there they are supplied with enough data to sustain their understanding. At home, for the women's teams, they only get scores and photos.

This is the biggest blind spot of the commercial model in women's sport. Sponsors wait for viewers to arrive. But viewers need infrastructure to arrive. And infrastructure needs money to exist. The loop closes again, only in reverse.

I do not go looking for a level playing field. I draw the touchlines myself.

When I served as a communications adviser for the Football Kenya Federation ahead of the Women's Africa Cup of Nations, my first proposal was not a bigger advertising budget. It was to hire two data recorders per domestic women's match. Just two people. With laptops and one training session. We did not need a revolution. We needed one person to sit down and write.

That proposal was judged too technical against leadership expectations, which wanted a quick image campaign. But I held my position. Without data, any image campaign is worth about three months. Data, once written down, outlives everyone in that meeting room.

What I learned from this period is a fascinating paradox. When you supply data to a neglected event, you do not merely improve it. You change the conditions of its existence. You give it the ability to be debated. And in the world of sport, a thing debated is a thing remembered.

I do not deny the value of story. I make my living from story. But story without data is the storyteller's story, not the athlete's. It turns the athlete into a character in someone else's work. And for a woman athlete who has had to fight to be seen at all, that is a subtler form of erasure, but no less complete.

When the data sheet starts to fill in

After The Invisible Tacticians report, I received more calls than I could count. Some from clubs wanting to be recorded. Some from parents of young women athletes, asking whether their daughters could join something similar. Some from media outlets, apologising for their prior silence.

I have to be blunt: a late apology does not restore lost data. But it opens a door I can walk through.

From 2026, a handful of Kenyan women's clubs began keeping their own data recorders. Not because of a big budget. Because someone realised they could do it for almost nothing, with a notebook and a phone. I received messages from women coaches sending me the first stat sheets they had written themselves. Rough numbers, handwritten, not yet standardised. But real.

And every time I receive such a sheet, I think of the N/A at two in the morning. The number of empty cells is shrinking. Slowly. Very slowly. But shrinking.

What is interesting is that when I compared the new sheets with the old ones, I realised something about myself. I too had contributed to that gap, in an indirect way. In my early years on the job, I also wrote in storytelling mode. I also chose the cheap option because deadlines did not let me choose the expensive one. I only changed when I realised that every number I skipped in an article erased a piece of a real person's memory.

This profession spares no one. Not even the pioneer.

The first channel is always the hardest, but someone has to hold the microphone. I have held it for eight years. There were nights I wanted to quit. There were days a colleague called me an over-actor. There were times I asked myself whether I was building an unnecessary battle around a few numbers.

Then I remember the cardboard notebook of the twenty-one-year-old goalkeeper in Kisumu. She does not know who I am. She does not need me to know who she is. But she kept writing. Day after day. By hand. In silence.

And if there is a writer, there must be a reader. I choose to be that reader.

Progressive takeaway: from N/A to a person's name

I still keep the two-a.m. sheet on my machine. I have not deleted it. I keep it there as a reminder.

Fourteen rows. Twenty-three cells. Not a single number.

But now I know something I did not know eight years ago. The N/A on that sheet is not an endpoint. It is a starting point. It is the confession of an entire industry that it stopped asking long ago. And any time someone sits down, opens a notebook, and starts writing, one N/A turns into a number. A number becomes a sheet. A sheet becomes a true story about a real person.

The 2026 World Cup showed me that Nigerians were looked at, not watched. But that was seven years ago. Seven years, in sport, is a generation. And the next generation of women athletes is writing its own notebooks right now, in Kisumu, in Eldoret, in Arusha, in Kampala. They are not waiting for anyone to hand them a microphone. They are recording themselves.

My question to you, reading this line, is not whether you support women's sport. Everyone says yes. My question is: when did you last look up one specific number about a woman athlete? When did you last argue about one tactical decision by a women's team?

If the answer is never, then you are not an audience. You are part of the gap.