At the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, Indonesia managed to bag three medals: one gold from sports climbing, one gold from weightlifting, and one bronze from badminton.
In fact, the nation has secured several medals in Olympic badminton events. In Paris last year, Gregoria Marika Tunjung won the first medal for Indonesia in the women's badminton singles event.
When it comes to the achievements of athletes, not only are their own efforts important, the level of encouragement and support offered to them during competitions can also have a major influence on their performance.
In this, sports science can play an important role. This was sufficiently evident in the performance of the ad hoc team of the Indonesian Badminton Association (PBSI), including Tunjung, at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
Sports science combines physiology, psychology, and nutritional science to ensure the continual development of athletes' physical, psychological, technical, and tactical performance, based on their needs, so that they can excel in their field.
Measured, integrated approach
The application of sports science has gained more relevance amid the stiff competition faced by world athletes and advances in technology and science. Therefore, it must be paid special attention.
Indonesia has shown its seriousness in developing sports science to support the performance of both junior and elite athletes in badminton, its mainstay sport at the Olympics through several measures.
One of them was the launch of the "PBSI Sport Science Analytics" platform in early 2025. The platform functions as a database that maps the condition of athletes and keeps records of events related to their health, fitness, and injuries.
It also incorporates recommendations for interventions and development programs from support teams, including the medical, physiotherapy, and nutritional teams.
The main features of the platform are integrated data input, logbook, and athlete comparison.
In the next development stage, the platform will connect information from the support teams with users, such as technical coaches, physical trainers, physiotherapists, doctors, and nutritionists.
It will also record how interventions are carried out and their impact on athlete performance.
"This is an effort to prepare and facilitate athletes to achieve the highest achievements at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. With this platform, training programs can be tailored to the conditions of each athlete," PBSI general chair M. Fadil Imran said.
Data collection is being carried out through the first measurement of athletes' conditions, which will serve as the baseline for future database development.
Athletes who are currently training at the national training center are undergoing a series of examinations for the preparation of their general medical profiles to anthropometric profiles.
These include size, proportion, and composition, nutritional needs profile, fitness profile and fatigue level, biomotor abilities, and screening of physiotherapy aspects to record injury history, joint range of motion, muscles, and maximum muscle contraction.
Coordinator of the PBSI's support team, Nanang Kusuma, said that the platform allows all data and information to be integrated into one place to support the preparation of more accurate training plans.
In the next stage, psychological screening will be the basis for providing mental training. In addition, technical performance screening has also been prepared to quantitatively determine technical errors or enforced errors.
The last step will be the enhancement of software to determine the strategy for each match. This will be done using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
Long-term program
Ideally, the application of sports science needs to be carried out early, without necessarily waiting for young or junior athletes to join a national training center.
According to Kusuma, sports science, which is used to monitor and find the right formula for athletes, also aims to track the performance of technical coaches, physical coaches, and support teams in developing data-based programs.
"In addition to being a baseline or initial standard from the medical, technical, and other aspects, it (the collected data) can be a benchmark for regional administrators so that the basis for athletes in the national training center can be recorded properly," he explained.
"The reference standards for physical, technical, and other conditions will be clear," he added.
Head of the development and achievement division of the PBSI National Training Center, Eng Hian, noted that sports science can also be a means to evaluate the development of badminton athletes from many aspects and the support from coaches and related experts.
"It is expected to be a continuous program to encourage athletes' achievements. With a collective spirit, we want the PBSI to create badminton champions," he said.
With the benefits it offers, sports science has increased hopes of badminton continuing to be the main contributor of medals for Indonesia at the Olympics.
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Editor: Rahmad Nasution
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