The Blank Cells of Cipayung: Indonesian Badminton's Data Problem

In June 2026, in the corridor of the press room at Istora Senayan, a Malaysian colleague leaned over and asked me something that sounded simple: over the past twelve months, how many times had Indonesia's number one men's singles player gone to a deciding game, and how many of those had he won.

I told him I would check and send it over. It took me two days.

The Badminton World Federation website gave me match scores, weekly rankings and the head-to-head record between any two players. All of that is useful, and none of it answered the question. Nobody publishes win rates in deciding games. Nobody publishes rally-length distributions, the percentage of points won at 18-18, or how often a player chooses a short serve when trailing. So I went back to the video, counted by hand, and entered everything into a spreadsheet. By the eleventh match I realised I had miscounted three of them.

I am not telling that story to apologise. I once introduced an athlete with the wrong home province, and realised I was running in the wrong lane myself. The mistake was not in the number. It was in believing this sport had been fully documented, when in fact it is still full of blank cells.

In Indonesia, badminton occupies the place football occupies in most other countries: a sport that carries national memory. It is not contained within a tournament. It lives in the way people name their children, in the roar at Istora, in the fathers stringing nets in narrow alleys, in ten-year-olds recruited into clubs in Kudus, Jakarta, Bandung and Sidoarjo.

At Barcelona 2026, Susi Susanti and Alan Budikusuma delivered Indonesia's first two Olympic gold medals, both in badminton. From then on the sport became the safe that held the country's sporting honour: Rexy Mainaky and Ricky Subagja at Atlanta 2026, Tony Gunawan and Candra Wijaya at Sydney 2026, Taufik Hidayat at Athens 2026, Markis Kido and Hendra Setiawan at Beijing 2026, Tontowi Ahmad and Liliyana Natsir at Rio 2026, Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu at Tokyo 2026.

Read that chain along a timeline and you find it was broken at least twice. London 2026 was the first time Indonesia left an Olympics with no badminton medal at all. Paris 2026 was the second. There, Gregoria Mariska Tunjung took bronze in women's singles, and it was the delegation's only badminton medal. Indonesia's two golds that year came from sport climbing, through Veddriq Leonardo, and weightlifting, through Rizki Juniansyah.

That is not a small event. It was only the second time since badminton became a full Olympic sport that Indonesia failed to win gold. And the public reaction was entirely familiar: blame the coaching staff, blame mentality, blame a stalled youth pipeline.

Most of that argument takes place around Cipayung, the national training centre of the Indonesian Badminton Association. Every player who wants to wear the national shirt passes through it. Before that, they pass through the club system: PB Djarum in Kudus, PB Jaya Raya in Jakarta, PB Exist, PB Mutiara Cardinal in Bandung, PB Surya Naga in Sidoarjo. A child is spotted at eleven, spends four years at a club, three years in the national squad, and walks onto the international court at eighteen. That is the standard route, and it is run by the human eye.

What kept me thinking was not the medals. It was the distance between the scale of the sport and the thinness of its record.

The Indonesia Open is one of four top-tier events on the World Tour, a Super 1000 with a prize purse above one million US dollars. Istora sells out before the first day. Broadcast rights go to multiple countries. In Indonesia, a badminton final can draw a bigger audience than any domestic football fixture.

Next to an industry of that size, the public data of this sport is astonishingly thin.

I measure that thinness against the sports I have covered. In athletics, when a sprinter runs 100 metres in 10.25 seconds, the result always travels with wind speed, reaction time and split times. I am grateful for the day I learned that a performance means nothing without the wind reading. In swimming, every race produces a breakdown by 50-metre segment, enough to see who accelerates and who dies in the second half. In football, data companies such as Opta and StatsBomb score every pass, every duel, every metre run, and that data has changed how clubs buy players.

Badminton gives us the score. 21-19, 18-21, 21-17. Plus a winner's name, a ranking, and how many times two people have met. Some World Tour events install video review to serve appeals, and occasionally publish the smash speed of a rally. But that is refereeing equipment, not a competitive record. Nobody publishes a table showing what percentage of points a player wins at 18-18 in a third game against a top-ten seed.

Three consequences follow, and all three are live at Cipayung.

The first is selection. Coaches decide who enters which draw, who plays singles, who is moved into doubles, based on internal sparring results and judgement. That is not wrong in principle, because the eye of a coach who has won a world title is worth more than many spreadsheets. But it cannot be audited. When a team fails at an Olympics, nobody can reconstruct the chain of decisions that led there. The argument therefore can only circle the final result, and the final result always arrives after everything is finished.

The second is workload. An elite men's singles match runs from forty to ninety minutes, with short intervals and constant changes of ends. The World Tour schedules events back to back, and some weeks a player crosses two continents. With no published load data, the only thing left to say about fitness is a feeling: he looked tired, he faded in the third game. Those statements are not false, but they help nobody plan.

The third is the opponent. Major teams, particularly in Asia, prepare by reconstructing every rally from video. They know that an Indonesian player likes to drive into the body at 19-18, or cuts cross-court when pinned to the left corner. Indonesian fans do not know, because nobody hands it to them. Spectators at Istora have to read a match by instinct that the opponent has already read with a spreadsheet.

And here is what I consider the most serious consequence. When the data is blank, people explain with morality. With no numbers on points late in a game, they call a player mentally weak. With no numbers on workload, they call him lacking will. With no numbers on the transition from junior to senior, they call the whole sport stagnant.

I grew up in a sports press where the word mentality is used as a black box. The problem with a black box is that it cannot be contradicted. A player who wins at 19-18 is praised for character. One who loses at 19-18 is accused of a weak mind. Both sentences describe the same event in two directions, and neither teaches anyone anything for next time.

Last year I tried something small. I sat down with roughly one hundred and twenty matches from two seasons at Istora, counted how many went to a deciding game, and recorded the score of that game. It took three weeks, two matches a night. The result proves nothing, because the sample is tiny and because, as I said at the start, I miscounted three of them. But the process taught me something more useful than any finding: data cannot be the side job of a curious individual; it has to be infrastructure. One person with time, knowledge and motivation still cannot build a reliable competitive record alone, because that work needs thousands of hours from many people, a single consistent standard, and somewhere to publish the output.

This runs straight into the debate Indonesians call regenerasi, the renewal of generations. Everyone says the pipeline is broken. But to know whether it is broken you would need the conversion rate from junior continental champion to top twenty in the world, the average age of the top twenty year by year, the number of years a player stays at the top. No institution in Indonesia publishes those numbers. So the familiar phrase remains a feeling, repeated often enough to sound like a finding.

I think about football, which I follow almost as closely. Mbappé did not change football; he revealed that football had already changed. What changed football was not a player but an entire industry of record-keeping standing behind him. Indonesian badminton is the same. Its biggest problem is not the absence of a new Gregoria. It is that nobody has recorded the path of a new Gregoria in a way that can still be read ten years later.

The reflex response to all this is to call for technology. Cameras, software, data analysts. I disagree with the order.

Cipayung does not lack machines. Training sessions there involve video analysis, doctors and strength specialists. What is missing is somewhere else: nobody has an incentive to publish what they hold. The coaching team keeps internal data. Clubs keep data on their own trainees. Strength coaches sign per-tournament contracts and take the data with them when they leave. Each has a legitimate reason not to share, and added together they form a system in which silence is the default.

Silence benefits whoever holds it. Publish numbers and you invite questions. Why this player entered this event and not another. Why training volume doubled on the eve of a Super 1000. Why a player withdrew. Publish nothing and nobody asks, and professional authority stays intact. This is an incentive problem, not a technical one, and it explains why buying more equipment will not raise a single flag.

There is also a simpler economic reason. There is no Opta of badminton, and nobody will build one out of goodwill. Football's data industry survives because broadcast rights and betting markets pay for it. Badminton's television market is many times smaller in unit value, and most betting revenue sits in unofficial channels where nobody invests in a public database. That work therefore falls to the state, to federations, or to people doing it out of curiosity.

Here I have to pull myself back a little. I have spent a career arguing that the story comes before the number, and I stand by it. The empty microphone during the pandemic taught me that the loudest sound does not come out of a speaker. Data is the microphone. It is not the voice. If in ten years Cipayung has complete data and still nobody can read the story of a twenty-something player walking out for the last match of his career, then we will simply have traded one silence for another, noisier one.

And it has to be said that the people doing this work best today are not sitting in federation meeting rooms. They are fan groups counting points by hand, building head-to-head files, translating news from low-tier events no newsroom covers. They are a few coaches at small clubs who have kept notebooks on every trainee for years. They are journalists willing to rewatch thirty matches to verify one detail. If a new competitive edge emerges in the region, it will come from there before it comes from the fitness room.

I have often been my own coach, in the sense of asking myself a question and then going to find the answer. In those moments I always remember something I call the lesson from the lane: a runner cannot know whether he is fast or slow if he only has a watch and nobody to time him. Indonesian badminton is in exactly that position. It is running very fast, and nobody is timing it properly.

If tomorrow the Indonesian Badminton Association opened all training and match data from the national training centre, every session, every internal match, every injury, would we have the courage to read it, and the patience not to turn reading it into another trial?