The Nation That Built Its Entire Olympic Identity on One Sport

Badminton became an Olympic sport for the first time at Barcelona in 1992. Indonesia won gold in both singles events that same year, and the country has basically never let go of the sport since.

Susi Susanti and Alan Budikusuma each took gold in Barcelona, giving Indonesia its first Olympic titles in any sport. Since then, Indonesia has claimed gold in nearly every Olympic badminton competition, missing out only at London 2012. Twenty-two of Indonesia’s forty Olympic medals overall have come from this one sport.

That’s not a strong tradition, but more like borderline monopoly-level dominance in a country of nearly 280 million people who genuinely could compete in dozens of other Olympic sports.

How this obsession actually started

Badminton arrived in Indonesia during the colonial era, introduced by Dutch settlers and originally played mostly among elites before it spread widely. Rudy Hartono turned it into a national phenomenon in the 1960s and 70s, winning the All England Championship an astonishing seven times in a row, a run that still stands as one of the sport’s great individual feats.

But it was Susanti’s gold in 1992 that turned genuine popularity into full-blown national obsession. She wasn’t just winning a badminton title. She was delivering Indonesia’s first Olympic gold in anything, full stop, and the entire country watched her do it.

The part that doesn’t get talked about enough

Here’s where this story gets more complicated than pure celebration. For decades, badminton wasn’t just Indonesia’s best sport. It was functionally the only sport delivering Olympic gold at all. Badminton legend Greysia Polii said it plainly after winning gold herself in Tokyo alongside Apriyani Rahayu: if badminton didn’t deliver, what sport was Indonesia supposed to look to instead?

That’s an enormous amount of pressure to load onto a small pool of athletes every four years. Every Olympic cycle, an entire nation’s gold medal hopes have historically rested on however many badminton players Indonesia managed to send. Lose early, and there’s genuine national disappointment attached, the kind normally reserved for football teams crashing out of a World Cup, except concentrated onto a handful of shuttlers instead of an eleven-man squad.

Winning gold, on the other hand, comes with rewards that sound almost mythical to outsiders. When Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu won gold at the Tokyo Olympics, they didn’t just get a cash prize from the government worth roughly $349,000. A local district head promised Apriyani five cows and a house. A restaurant chain offered to name a venue after them.

Why this finally started shifting

Indonesia’s gold medal reliance on badminton alone finally cracked at the Paris Olympics, when Veddriq Leonardo won gold in speed climbing and Rizki Juniansyah took gold in weightlifting, both before that Games’ badminton competition had even wrapped up. Greysia Polii, watching from the outside as a retired champion, said she cried with relief that the badminton athletes finally weren’t carrying the country’s entire Olympic identity alone.

That reaction says everything about how much weight this sport has quietly carried for over three decades. Indonesia didn’t just love badminton. It needed badminton, every single Olympic cycle, and that’s a very different kind of pressure than simple national pride.

Should a country’s Olympic identity ever rest that heavily on one sport, or is that exactly what makes badminton in Indonesia so compelling to watch?