"I only get Tk 3000 as allowance per month apart from accommodation and food in the national camp. They are giving me an additional Tk 2000 as house rent since I got married… There is no future playing for the national team," Bangladesh's star archer Ruman Sana said to The Daily Star in March last year, explaining why he no longer wants to play for the national team.

Ruman expressed his frustrations about the lack of facilities and the dearth of financial opportunities in archery and said that he saw no future for himself.

It is unclear whether the Bangladesh Archery Federation (BAF) took his lamentations seriously as, in response, the federation's general secretary Kazi Razibuddin Ahmed Chapal said Ruman has mental issues and that he will "take him to a good psychiatrist".

Fast-forward to January 2025, Ruman is no longer in Bangladesh. He is in the USA with his wife Diya Siddique, the country's leading women archer. The pair is seeking that "better future" overseas which their motherland could not provide.

"We left the country for the USA on December 29, hoping for a better future," Ruman told The Daily Star over the phone from New Jersey on Thursday, further informing that they travelled on five-year visas obtained in 2021.

Ruman and Diya both are Olympians, together they won a silver medal in the Archery World Cup in 2021 -- the country's best-ever achievement at that level -- and have won numerous medals for Bangladesh across different international meets.

While Ruman's stocks had dropped recently with his performances being on a downward curve, Diya's was on the rise and the 20-year-old had a lot more to give to archery. But now, it seems Diya would remain another 'what if' case in Bangladesh's sporting history.

Ruman and Diya's departure was not an isolated incident by any means. In October last year, Hakim Ahmed Rubel, the leading men's archer in the national side in Ruman's absence, quit archery and flew to New York, without even informing the federation. There, Rubel joined Ashim Kumar, another former archer who left the sport and is now making a living driving cars for ride-sharing services.

Athletes quitting and moving overseas is not something that just happens in archery nor is it a new occurrence as it has been happening for decades.

Some left quietly, like the archers, while some have disappeared from a touring contingent during international meets, like runner Tawhidul Islam did in the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia, bringing great shame to the country.

Now, saying there is no financial security for sportspersons in Bangladesh, is not entirely true. The leading men's cricketers and footballers rake in big bucks and even mid-level players earn a respectable living. The women cricketers and footballers earn significantly less than their male counterparts but compared to other disciplines, they are better off.

Archery as a discipline has been on the rise in Bangladesh for a few years. So, when the biggest stars of that discipline determine it is better to quit and start afresh abroad, it makes one question the country's sports landscape.

A few weeks back, the country's sports fans were celebrating the news that very soon Hamza Choudhury, an English Premier League footballer, will play for Bangladesh.

All due respect to Hamza, he was never singled out as a global breakout star like Ruman, who was named the world's breakthrough archer in 2019 by the World Archery Federation.

But the jubilation of Hamza's arrival will drown out faint sighs of regret of losing Ruman and Co. And possibly in a few years, the sports fraternity would start wondering, why did our archery fall off?