The Empty Spreadsheet: I Count Golds in Mirpur, the River Keeps No Ledger

I spent that evening at the outdoor pool in Mirpur tallying which source owned each of 76 golds. The year was 2026; I was 24. At the National Swimming Championship press row I was the only woman, and twice an official came over to ask whether I was someone's guest. I did not answer. I wrote in my notebook: Navy 44, Army 19, BKSP 9, and the remaining four split among civilian clubs. Rajshahi Division entered two swimmers and reached zero finals. I did not file a report that day; I filed a table. Because counting golds in Mirpur, the applause sounded rented to me. That evening I understood something for the first time: the biggest swimming story in this country is not the medal count. It is which numbers we count—and which numbers we let vanish. Swimming here was never first a sport; it was a survival skill. In the Padma, Jamuna and Meghna delta, millions of children grow up beside water, yet they are never taught to swim. Government figures put child drownings at roughly 40 a day—more than 14,000 a year. I do not write that number as a hot-take hammer; it is our soil, our monsoon, our river islands. And yet, in the national sports structure, swimming means one outdoor pool in Mirpur and one championship a year. The Bangladesh Swimming Federation's president is a Navy officer—there is nothing to hide there, that is simply the arrangement. The Army, Navy and Air Force each have their own pools, coaches and meal plans. A young swimmer rising from a civilian club must compete against a system where athletes are produced by an entirely different logic. That is where my real question sits. If we count golds in Mirpur every year, why has not a single civilian-club swimmer in two decades reached international standard? The answer is simple and uncomfortable: those golds belong less to clubs than to institutional infrastructure. In a Navy pool, training happens morning and evening, food is provided, coaches are paid on time. In a civilian club, the swimmer pays the rent and hunts for a coach. That inequality shows up in the medal table—and we parade that table as national glory. One thing needs saying plainly, because this piece is easy to misread. I am not turning the services into villains. Their pools work; where the state failed to act, they at least built something. The problem is that we mistake the services' success for national swimming success, and that hides the civilian vacuum. BKSP sits in the same trap—the best talent gathers there, but its doors do not open for the ordinary teenager outside. So what should we count alongside the golds? My answer: the water. How many children drown in which district each year, which unions have swimming instructors, how many schools can rent a pond—if these facts were assembled into one table each year, our whole understanding of swimming would shift. Instead, the federation keeps the gold ledger, and no one keeps the drowning ledger—or an NGO keeps it in a separate book, for separate interests. I learned to swim very late. In 2026, at 27, the Mirpur pool closed, the championship was cancelled, my column budget went to zero—and I found myself on a boat near Rajshahi, on a Padma char where children learn to swim in current, not in lanes. Then I admitted something embarrassing: I could barely swim. Six months of SwimSafe lessons fixed it. Since then, every piece I write contains at least one sentence you can only get standing on a riverbank, in a boat, or in a pool. The Padma current taught me something no medal table ever did. To survive a current you must calculate—where the pull is, where the eddy turns, how long you can hold your breath. That is the real education of swimming, and the lane-counting championship in Mirpur never teaches it. Our national swimming has forgotten the river, even though this country's true pool is the river. Which brings me to Brojen Das. In 2026 he became one of the first Asians to cross the English Channel—there was no services pool then, only river and will. Then what? Thirty-seven years later, in 2026, the Sagor and Himel relay crossed the Channel again—a symbolic return. Symbolic, because no institutional pipeline was built through it. A Channel crossing is thrills to us; long-distance river racing—on the Dhaleshwari, the Shitalakshya—never earns a news page. And here the media is complicit. Cricket eats the newsroom. When the World Cup comes, the Dhaka desk prints sixteen pages of group-stage previews while the National Age Group Championship gets nine lines. In 2026, during the Russia World Cup, I wrote exactly that piece—headlined: "We know every squad number in Russia. We don't know how many children drowned yesterday." It passed 200,000 reads and drew three furious letters from sports officials. I count that as work well done, because at least someone noticed the ledger that day. Now the question where I catch myself. If I say swimming's core problem is a lack of data, am I not falling into my own profession's trap? What good is counting data if there is no pool? Maybe I should say something harder—maybe the problem is not data but political will. Teaching a child to swim is less glamorous than winning a medal, so it gets no budget. By that logic, my love of spreadsheets is a comfortable escape—hiding behind a number so the burden of real decisions never lands on me. Then again, the opposite may also be true. If I make the services' dominance the sole villain, I flatten a complex system. The services do produce swimmers—but as a display of their own capability, not as part of a state duty. There is no conspiracy here, only an unequal investment. And my suspicion is that the biggest mistake would be turning the child-drowning figure into a mere moral hammer—milking tears and making it hot-take raw material, while instructors, rural girls' access and programs like SwimSafe drop out of the frame. Swimming in this country lives in two separate worlds. One is the outdoor Mirpur pool, the medal table and the press release. The other is monsoon water, river-island children and wet death. We treat the first as national sport and forget the second as accident. Yet they are the same story—same country, same water, same neglect. My sharpest complaint is against the language of the press release. If a federation that holds one championship a year, led by a services officer, declares its success through a gold count, that is not success—it is accounting sleight of hand. The real ledger appears only when one spreadsheet carries, side by side, how many medals and how many children learned to swim. So far that spreadsheet is empty. Let me offer a prediction that can be tested. If Bangladesh gets a new indoor aquatic centre in the next three years, and that centre has no separate scholarships for swimmers from rural districts, the Mirpur medal table will look exactly the same—Navy first, the rest behind. And if we truly want change, the first task is not counting golds; the first task is opening a spreadsheet—medals on one side, one wet name on the other. The question is blunt: do we want swimming as national glory, or as national duty?