Three Decades After Susi Susanti's Gold: The Tactical Puzzle of Indonesian Women's Singles

I still remember that night at Istora Senayan, when the women's singles semifinal ended after seventy-eight minutes and only one player remained on court, bending down to retie her shoelaces. The stands had not emptied; the drums still echoed from the eastern corner. Yet that moment carried a silence of its own. The kind of silence I have learned to listen for over many years in this profession — not because people had nothing to say, but because they had never thought to ask the right question. The room is not silent; it simply has never thought it needed that question. People count medals and titles, but few count the number of times a female player has had to change her own game before anyone bothered to name the problem.

I am not telling this story to provoke tears. I am telling it for the data.

In Barcelona, in 2026, Susi Susanti climbed to the top of the women's singles podium — Indonesia's first Olympic badminton gold, and one of the moments that shaped an entire sporting nation. Back then, Indonesian women's singles was the centre. Academies in Kudus, at Jaya Raya, at Djarum trained female athletes with the same seriousness they trained men. But after Susi retired in the late 1990s, something quietly changed. Not a collapse. Just a shift of attention — resources, broadcast time, and overseas training slots — gradually tilting toward men's singles, where the names guaranteed advertising revenue.

I have watched hundreds of women's singles matches over more than three decades. Based on my experience tracking these matches, there is a paradox few people mention: the technical quality of women's badminton in Southeast Asia has not declined. What has declined is the quality of decision-making at decisive moments — and that can be measured.

Take one concrete example. At a World Tour-level event in the 2026–2026 period, recording point by point in women's singles, I noticed a pattern. The world's leading female players — An Se-young of Korea, who won gold at the Paris 2026 Olympics and the 2026 World Championship; Akane Yamaguchi of Japan; Tai Tzu-ying of Chinese Taipei — share something that is not their smash. It is the control of rally tempo: changing rally length at the right moment, forcing the opponent to move on their terms, then delivering the finishing shot on the third or fourth shot of a sequence the opponent believed was defense.

That is the difference between playing well and playing with structure.

At the level of Indonesian women's singles, the gap is not foot speed. Our young players run fast, jump high, and their fitness has improved markedly. The gap lies in the structure of the next shot — the ability to predict the returning shuttle and to prepare the answer before it crosses the net. Reviewing footage in slow motion, I count the number of times a player shifts from reaction to initiative within a rally. Among the world's leading players, that number is nearly double.

That is why I believe the problem in Indonesian women's singles is a coaching problem, not a talent problem. And it has less to do with money than people assume.

I have an odd habit: I often open two screens at once, one showing a World Tour women's singles match, the other a men's singles match from the same round. Not to compare who is stronger. I do it to separate so-called speed from so-called tactics. Tactics have no gender; our gaze does. When both screens run side by side, you will see the same deep high clear, the same drop shot, the same change of direction — yet how viewers describe them differs completely. One is called courage; the other is called luck.

The origin of that difference lies in coaching. I grew up in Germany, where sport is taught through systems: every session has a measurable objective, every error is recorded, and every player must be able to explain why she chose that shot. In Southeast Asia, where I have worked for many years, the teaching is intuitive and flexible: players are encouraged to improvise, to read the opponent, to play to their own rhythm. Both have value. But in modern women's singles, where the average rally lasts longer and the number of decisive rallies per game keeps rising, improvisation without structure is punished at the final points.

There is something I observe at junior events. In U17 and U19 women's singles at several domestic tournaments, the entry list remains long. But when I sit in the stands and count how many coaches are present to analyse matches, the number is far lower than for boys' matches of the same age. No one sits taking notes for these girls. No one prepares a game plan for the next round. They grow up on instinct, and when they step onto the international stage at twenty, they must relearn from scratch what should have been taught at fifteen.

Many Southeast Asian female players are caught between two worlds. They are taught to trust instinct, yet on the international stage they face opponents trained to turn that instinct into data. The result: they win the beautiful points and lose the important ones. And the media, instead of pointing to the missing structure, calls it a lack of nerve.

When I speak of Gregoria Mariska Tunjung, I am speaking of a player who changed the very structure of her own matches. After a long period judged to be inconsistent, she adjusted how she enters a match: fewer early smashes, more control at the net, and, most importantly, learning to accept long rallies as part of a plan rather than a failure. The bronze medal at the Paris 2026 Olympics is the result of a process of tactical adjustment that the newspapers rarely mention, because they prefer to talk about moments of brilliance.

But here is the harder part.

In sports media, the value of a sport is usually measured by viewership and broadcast rights. Women's football is undervalued because it has no audience; women's badminton is undervalued differently — it is accepted, but only as a supporting item in a programme where men's singles remains the headline. The paradox is this: when the media decides that women's sport is not worth investing in, it manufactures the very result it uses to justify that decision. Less airtime, less analysis, less budget — then the conclusion that it is less attractive.

I once heard a producer tell me that women's content has no audience. I was forty-two, fifteen years into the profession, and I did not argue. I went home, opened a spreadsheet, and counted. At a regional tournament, a women's match on a small channel drew higher viewership than a heavily promoted men's match. Data does not speak on its own — someone has to put it on the table.

Two screens. One showing the women's match, one the men's. And between them, I learned something I believe is the central insight of this piece: the commercial value of a sport is decided not by the quality of its competition, but by the quality of the story we choose to tell about it. When we tell women's badminton in the language of tactics — in rallies, in conversion rates on serve, in the way a female player adjusts her position after being pushed to the back half — viewers do not leave. They stay. They stay because they have been given something to look at.

That is what I learned in the hardest years of this craft.

In 2026, when every tournament stopped, the website I worked for went bankrupt and I lost my job. I shut myself in a dark room, rewatching old footage, trying to remember why I chose this profession. That night I rewatched a women's match in an empty stadium. A goalkeeper stood alone in her penalty area amid the hollow air. I reached out and learned she had been working dozens of hours a week in a hospital while training on her own. There was no medal that week. Only a woman, a lamp, and a decision no one witnessed. The stadium was empty, yet I could still hear the heartbeat of an entire team. From that night, I abandoned the writing that only counts rallies and began learning to listen to the silence between them.

But that listening must be verified. If Indonesian women's singles is to return to the standing of the Susi Susanti era, it needs a system. Specifically, it needs four things I believe can be measured.

A tactical dataset built for women, rather than merging data from both genders as today's analytical programmes do, which dilutes the tactical distinctions of women's matches.

A decision-training programme built around rallies, teaching female players to recognise opponents' patterns alongside drilling isolated technique.

Equal treatment in the allocation of overseas training slots — because it is precisely the camps in Germany, Japan, or Korea where tactics are transmitted fastest.

And a media decision: to cover women's badminton with the same seriousness given to men's.

The last point deserves emphasis. When I edit colleagues' work, I am not known for going easy. I learned that words are a form of discipline: you must not let emotion replace truth, and you must not let your own laziness damage the reader. Female athletes do not need our pity; they need us to tell their story correctly. The same holds for women's badminton. A female player does not need to be described as courageous simply because she competes in a women's event. She needs to be analysed as a decision-maker, someone solving a problem of speed and space in front of an opponent.

I know this is easier said than done. Sports media in Southeast Asia still revolves around big names and explosive performances. Women's badminton does not offer many explosive moments to post. It offers long rallies, quiet changes of direction, moments where a player must decide for herself within fifteen seconds. And those fifteen seconds, if you do not record them, pass without leaving anything behind.

That is why I still carry a notebook with twelve lines of notes per match. Not to appear learned, but to keep what no camera captures.

In Paris in 2026, the wave of attention for several women's sports rose and then subsided. A bronze medal in women's singles, after years of waiting, came from a player who had learned to change herself. But a medal is not a system. It is the outcome of a system — or, in Indonesia's case, of a few individuals who built systems for themselves amid the gaps the industry left behind.

What I want to see is not another medal retold through tears. What I want to see is a tactical breakdown of a women's singles match on the front page, read by people who never thought they cared about women's badminton. What I want to see is a fourteen-year-old girl in Kudus who opens her phone, sees herself reflected in the way a top player moves on court — and understands that she is looking at a problem to solve, not a dream.

Thirty years from now, if a woman again sits in row seven of some arena, taking notes in silence, I hope she will not have to wonder why the right question was never asked. I hope she will only have to record the answer.