Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 7:32 PM
so my twitter feed for the past week has been mostly about sea games.
while most people are rooting for indonesia's soccer team, i have to be honest: i don't find myself interested in doing the same thing.
i mean, i'm all for indonesia winning the gold medal for soccer, but i'm not really fond of watching soccer matches, spending 90 mins watching the ball being kicked from here to there. out of those 90 minutes maybe each team will score around 2 goals...
on the other hand, i'm all for indonesia's men badminton squad.
i've always been a fan of indo's badminton squad.
i think, out of all of indo's national team, badminton is the only sport that indo can be really proud of.
indonesia is among the top 4 national badminton squads, with china, malaysia, and denmark.
this is a really remarkable achievement, compared to other sports in indonesia.
so i did a little browsing around wiki about indonesia's national badminton team.
here's what i got.
The Indonesia men's team has participated in Thomas Cup
23 times, won the title 13 times and never failed to qualify. Indonesia
has played in the decisive final tie on 18 occasions and never failed
to place among the top four teams.
Badminton
is Indonesia's most successful sport. Indonesia has won gold medals in
badminton in every Olympic Games since the sport was first introduced to
the Olympics in 1992.
Rudy Hartono is an Indonesian legendary badminton player, who has succeeded to win All England titles six times in a row.[2]
Out of all participating nations, Indonesia won the most games in the Thomas Cup (Men Nations Badminton Championship), winning 13 out of 24. In addition to that, Indonesia won the Uber Cup
3 times. (Women Nations Badminton Championship). Indonesia also held
its own international badminton tournament, the most prestigious is Indonesia Open that had been held annually since 1982.
So we actually have to thank those badminton players for introducing Indonesia to the international public.
Back to Sea Games, I watched the men's badminton finals which was held this evening.
3 players which I think played super fine were Simon Santoso (Men's Single), Markis Kido, and Hendra Setiawan (Men's Double).
I came across the first match--Simon Santoso and Daren Liew from Malaysia--by chance. I turned on the TV and it was already showing that Simon was leading the match.
His play was really good, although not as good as Taufik Hidayat in his glory days. A lot of good smash and remarkable shuttlecock position. And he's kinda attractive, isn't he?
He's only 26 so I'm hoping he would snatch the Olympics gold medal next year, though it would be tough because unlike SEA Games, China will be participating and China's players are just scarily good (watching a match between Indo-China is really depressing)
Markis Kido and Hendra Setiawan, Indonesia's #1 Men's Double, was the key of winning the gold medal. They played against Mak Hee Chun and Ong Soon Hock.
I was completely awed by their performance. They really know each other's place and about 30 minutes after the match began the pair already played their first game ball.
Hendra's smashes were jawdropping. It was like, smash after smash after smash. I felt pretty bad for the Malaysia's team. No wonder they were once world's best men's double.
I hope all of the other sports in Indonesia can look up to the badminton squad. They are known for their achievements and not for their riots and anarchist supporters.
Back To Top
