Why Athletics Reads 'N/A' as a Clearance — and Who Pays the Bill

The first line of the report carried no diagnosis. It carried an empty cell, and inside that cell was written: N/A.

In September 2026, while phasing athletes back onto the track at the SAI centre in Patiala, I worked off a single spreadsheet. Twenty-two track athletes on the left, seven coaches on the right, and in the middle the column somebody had labelled 'load/screening'. Fourteen soft-tissue cases landed in the first six-week block. Of the nine athletes we returned to full track work earliest, the entry against each name read: N/A.

In the review meeting that N/A quietly became a clearance. Volume went up in one group. Spike work was added in another. By the end of week six, three hamstrings and one Achilles had come out of exactly the group whose column was blank. I wrote a memo that week — numbers, dates, session counts — and the memo was adopted without ceremony.

An empty cell is not proof of risk, but it is not proof of safety either. It is the absence of data, and Indian athletics still reads those two things off the same line of the same page.

The arithmetic of a sparse-then-crammed calendar

The domestic calendar does not divide its twelve months evenly. Federation Cup in April–May, Inter-State in June, Nationals in September–October. In between, several athletes go months without a recorded competition. Then two meets and a national trial arrive inside three weeks. That swing is not an athlete's carelessness; it is a scheduling design.

On top of it sits the sports-quota job. Railways and Services athletes carry an office week alongside morning and evening sessions. When Monday to Friday belongs to duty and the weekend belongs to the track, the recovery day disappears from the calendar — and when the recovery day disappears, the information a physio could have logged disappears with it.

SAI centre staffing is the second source of that blank. One physio is shared across squads. Foreign biomechanists arrive at national camps with motion capture and force plates, but the staff who would convert that data into daily rehab stay behind. TOPS funding since 2026 has opened a channel that reaches equipment and camps; it reaches a load-monitoring system and a travelling physio far more slowly.

My Bangladesh-to-India vantage allows me to hold two systems side by side. Dhaka's system reads injury as personal misfortune. Delhi's system reads injury as institutional failure and then files the blame with the athlete. Both routes terminate at the same empty cell; only the accused changes.

Three layers inside one blank

A decoder's job is not sentiment, it is unlayering. That N/A gets created in three places, and it means something different in each.

The screening layer. Pre-participation screening never ran. No movement screen, no Nordic hamstring test, no shoulder-positioning check. The cell is empty because the question was never asked. That emptiness belongs to administration, not to the athlete.

The entity layer. A session happened, an athlete felt something, and no file recorded a name, a date, or the technical cause of the sensation. Thousands of training hours pass unnamed every year in Indian athletics. Without a name there is no history, and without history the next occurrence feels like the first one.

The risk-label layer. This is where the mistake gets expensive. Blank gets read as green. The coach sees N/A and thinks: fine. The medical team sees no logged complaint and thinks: no problem. The federation sees a clean report.

Anti-doping runs the opposite rule, which shows how else this could work. Indian top athletes file whereabouts; three missed tests in twelve months become a violation on their own. Absence is treated as risk there.

Why is absence not treated as risk in injury surveillance? If a missed test carries a consequence, why does a missed screen carry none? Until that question reaches the rulebook, every N/A returns next season wearing a hamstring.

The load ledger: injury as subtraction, not bad luck

I read every injury as an equation — volume, surface, calendar, recovery. Add the first three, subtract the last. What remains is the injury. Bad luck has no seat in this arithmetic.

Javelin shoulders return across the Haryana–Punjab–western UP belt. The driver is not the difficulty of the event but accumulated throw volume. The winter akhada lineage builds strength, yet within that same tradition overhead throws go uncounted all year. What is uncounted does not come down.

Stress fractures in the Kerala distance pipeline tell a different story. There the cause is not excess volume but changed surface and a sudden mileage jump. Shoes changed, surface changed, and nobody wrote down a weekly ceiling.

Relay hamstring clusters are the cleanest example, because the risk is collective. One baton-exchange drill raises sprint volume for the whole group at once. Four athletes, one error, four files.

The Panipat akhada lineage and P.T. Usha's Kozhikode school are two load cultures rather than two anecdotes. The akhada gives a body more force on less surface; Kozhikode runs on rhythm, cadence and speed-endurance volume. Injury shapes differ in the two places — and the measurement method should not.

The files that were filled in

Not every return-to-play story looks alike. In some, every session is named, and those are the stories that end well.

At Tokyo 2026 I watched eighteen warm-up throws from Neeraj Chopra on the warm-up track and checked his strapping with two coaches. The 87.58m was no miracle; it is the story of six months of silence after 2026 elbow surgery, then one throw that answered every question.** Every elbow test, every block-leg drill, every rest day in his file carried a name.

A broadcaster offered a prime slot for a 'miracle elbow' headline. I turned it down, because the miracle frame erases the twenty-two months of work done by SAI, NIS Patiala and the foreign biomechanics group. The shoulder had already told the story before the scan did — nobody had simply read it.

Mohamed Salah's shoulder at Russia 2026 is the second example. After the injury in the Kyiv final he missed Egypt's 0-1 opener against Uruguay, then played two group games and scored twice. My 1,200-word explainer mapped the shoulder mechanism and the return-to-play window, leaned on Egyptian physios, and refused a miracle-cure frame. Two Asian outlets syndicated it.

At Qatar 2026, Lucas Hernandez went down in the 13th minute against Australia. I speculated on no private scans; I explained the knee mechanism and the return window. The real story was Bayern Munich's left-back shortage, which pulled the January loan for Joao Cancelo. In a transfer window an injury timeline is the most honest currency in the market, because there every single day is priced.

Fourth place deserves the same reading. Milkha Singh finished fourth at Rome 2026, P.T. Usha ran 55.42 and missed a medal at Los Angeles 2026 by one hundredth of a second, Anju Bobby George set a 6.83m national record with a single kidney, and Paris 2026 left 89.45m behind Arshad Nadeem's 92.97m. The fourth-place inheritance is a physiological story before it is a psychological one — a body, a specific load, a specific day.

The 2026 document and the habit of suspicion

In 2026 six women athletes received CAS-confirmed bans, relay members among them, and the 2026 relay result has carried an asterisk since. That is the documented record and it should stay documented.

But that record trained a generation to read every withdrawal as concealment. When an athlete pulls out of a camp, the question should be about training load, not about punishment. Keeping the documented record and inferring about a named individual in the same paragraph is not journalism; it is laziness. Where failure must be written, write the system — the absence of supplement education, the reflex to cover up, the thin testing base.

The contrarian case: what 'load management' actually manages

Load management is crowned today as modern sports science. In practice it is often something else — a polite name for making room for commercial tours and friendlies. When a superstar gets a 'precautionary rest' and turns up in an exhibition three days later, that was not management. That was a priority decision.

In football the five-substitute rule has turned the last twenty minutes into a war of attrition. Deep squads bring on runners from the 70th minute and force the opponent to sprint continuously. That load lands on the hamstrings and Achilles of the team absorbing it — and it lands in no spreadsheet anywhere.

On the other side sits the old collision between rushing back and scientific rehab. The club's pressure line wants an early return; the athlete's body asks for slow proofs. The middle path comes from tests, not dates. Return-to-play is not a date on a calendar; it is a sequence of small proofs.

There is a third, less-discussed side. Not every empty cell is negligence. Sometimes N/A is honesty — when a decoder refuses to name tissue from a screen or a photograph. Declaring a 'grade-three ACL' from a broadcast frame is the easiest service to offer and the largest error to make. I go back to the frame where the foot planted and the joint gave, describe the visible deviation and the plausible mechanism, state what imaging would need to show, and wait for the athlete or the medical team to supply the name.

That is why demanding a one-line verdict by evening is the biggest trap of all. That verdict serves the deadline, not the reader.

A forward question instead of a conclusion

What must change next season is not a headline but a column. A named screening protocol at every SAI centre, one travelling physio with every squad, and every session's volume logged the same day — those three things fill the N/A that currently reads as green.

While that column stays empty, we will have explanations of injuries and no injury history. And without history, the next injury will always feel like the first.