Increased prosperity and better health mean that the younger generation are, on the whole, much physically fitter and stronger than their seniors, allowing them to compete with the best in international sports.
ith a haul of two golds and a bronze at the 2024 Summer Games, Indonesia enjoyed its best Olympic performance since 1992, the last time it won two gold medals.
Congratulations are in order for all 29 national athletes who represented our country in Paris across 12 different sports. We know they trained hard and did their best for the honor of the nation, as well as for themselves.
We certainly wish we had come away with more medals. Our special thanks to Rizki Juniansyah in weightlifting and Veddriq Leonardo in speed climbing, whose gold medals meant the national anthem “Indonesia Raya” was played twice in Paris; and to Gregoria Mariska Tunjung, whose badminton bronze saved the day for Indonesia, which has a long tradition of mining medals in the sport.
The speed climbing gold has also shown that the country is capable of finding glory outside of badminton, weightlifting and archery – the sports from which all of Indonesia’s past Olympic medals have come.
Granted, 2024 may have been a good Olympic year for Indonesia relative to its previous appearances, but in international sports, good is hardly good enough. We should demand nothing less than excellence.
The nation expects more from their sporting men and women. The responsibility for bringing this about falls on the shoulders not only of the athletes themselves but of the National Olympics Committee, the country’s various sports federations and the sports minister. If it were a corporate world, many of these sports officials would be fired for their low “key performance indicators”.
This not a misplaced or misguided expectation. There are many objective reasons why Indonesia should do much better at the Olympics.
As the world’s fourth-most-populous nation, we have a huge pool of talent, for almost any sport, waiting to be discovered. China and the United States, respectively with the first- and third-largest populations in the world, were neck and neck at the top of the Paris Olympic medal tally thanks in part to the size of their populations. Indonesia should be there too.
The state of the economy may have been used in the past as an excuse for our poor sports performance, but today, Indonesia is an upper-middle-income country and rising through the global ranks. It is projected to be among the five largest economies in the world by the middle of the century; is a member of the club of nations with GDPs of more than US$1 trillion; and last year chaired the Group of 20, comprising some of the world’s wealthiest nations.
Increased prosperity and better health mean that the younger generation are, on the whole, much physically fitter and stronger than their seniors, allowing them to compete with the best in international sports.
But missing is our drive as a nation to excel in sports internationally. The Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius, latin for “faster, higher, stronger” has yet to catch on here. The pursuit of excellence that the motto implies has failed to become part of the nation’s culture in many fields – sports, unfortunately, being one of them.
Also missing are proper sports facilities, even in major cities, which would rather build shopping malls, as well as effective incentives to inspire our young athletes to dedicate themselves to their sports.
Instead of being among the greatest sporting nations in the world, Indonesia ended the Paris Olympics in the high 30s in the medal tally ranking. Many countries much smaller in population and economic size fared better.
One Olympics will not change Indonesia’s ranking, but over a longer horizon, the nation needs a strong vision for international sports success and the proper strategy to get there, which includes making the necessary investments and coming up with the right policies.
We have a long way to go. In the 2023 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, Indonesia came in third place, behind Vietnam and Thailand. In the Asian Games the same year, we came in 13th. With a stronger commitment from the top, however, it’s not inconceivable that we could be a great sporting nation by the time we celebrate Golden Year 2045, the 100th anniversary of our nation’s independence.
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