Indonesia has no national sport fixed by law; the two sports most often named are badminton, its most successful international sport, and pencak silat, the indigenous martial art that UNESCO added to its intangible heritage list in December 2019. Badminton has won Indonesia 22 of its 40 Olympic medals up to 2024 and a record 14 Thomas Cups, and it is played everywhere from Jakarta's Istora Senayan to factory courts in Central Java. Pencak silat belongs to the archipelago itself, with hundreds of styles rooted in West Java, Sumatra and beyond. Football, meanwhile, fills the biggest stadiums. The clearest way to see how these sports fit together is to visit the places where they are played.
Istora Senayan, Jakarta: Badminton's Home Court since 1961
The Istora Gelora Bung Karno, known for decades as Istora Senayan, is the closest thing Indonesian badminton has to a cathedral. The indoor arena in Jakarta's Gelora Bung Karno sports complex opened with the 1961 Thomas Cup and served the 1962 Asian Games. Since 1982 it has been the usual home of the Indonesia Open, now one of only four Super 1000 tournaments on the world tour, although some editions moved to other cities such as Surabaya, Batam and Bali. Since its renovation for the 2018 Asian Games it seats 7,166, and the same hall also hosts the Indonesia Masters, held there since 2018.
The national body behind it, the Badminton Association of Indonesia (PBSI), was founded in Bandung on 5 May 1951. Indonesia entered the Thomas Cup, the men's world team championship, in 1958 and won it at the first attempt. It has reached the final stage of every edition it has entered. Its record 14 titles include four in a row from 1970 to 1979 and five in a row from 1994 to 2002; the latest came in Aarhus, Denmark, in the 2020 edition played in October 2021. The women have won the Uber Cup three times, and Indonesia won the first Sudirman Cup mixed-team title in 1989.
The Istora crowd has watched generations of champions. Rudy Hartono, born in Surabaya in 1949, won the All England men's singles eight times, seven of them in a row from 1968 to 1974, and took the 1980 world title at his only attempt. Taufik Hidayat, known as "Mr Backhand", won the Indonesia Open six times and took the men's singles gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics; he is now Indonesia's deputy minister for youth and sport. Liliyana Natsir won world titles in mixed doubles with two different partners, and in 2016 she and Tontowi Ahmad became the first Indonesian mixed pair to win Olympic gold, in Rio de Janeiro.
Badminton became a full Olympic medal sport at Barcelona in 1992, and Indonesia won both singles golds there: Susi Susanti in the women's event and Alan Budikusuma in the men's. They were the country's first Olympic champions, and the couple later married. Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu won women's doubles gold at the Tokyo Games held in 2021, and Indonesia and China are the only countries to have won Olympic gold in all five badminton events. Badminton is no longer the only source of gold, though: at Paris 2024 Rizki Juniansyah won the men's 73 kg weightlifting and Veddriq Leonardo the speed climbing, Indonesia's first Olympic titles outside badminton.
Kudus, Central Java: The Djarum Club Behind the 1984 Thomas Cup
Much of that success traces back to a small town on the north coast of Central Java. PB Djarum began in 1969 on a court at the Djarum cigarette factory on Jalan Bitingan Lama in Kudus, where company chief Budi Hartono encouraged employees to play. A young player named Liem Swie King stood out, and Hartono turned the factory games into an organised club. When Indonesia won the Thomas Cup in Kuala Lumpur in 1984, seven of the eight players came from PB Djarum, among them Liem Swie King, Christian Hadinata and Hastomo Arbi.
The company's name also went on the country's biggest tournament: from 2004 to 2013 the event at Istora was billed as the Djarum Indonesia Open. The club's reach is now national. Since 2006 the Djarum Foundation has held scholarship auditions for children, first in Kudus and from 2015 in several cities; in 2018 nearly 6,000 children took part and 23 received places. The auditions have drawn criticism as tobacco marketing aimed at minors after Indonesia tightened advertising rules for cigarettes in 2012, a debate that sits alongside the club's record of producing champions.
Taman Mini and the Sawah of West Sumatra: Where Pencak Silat Lives
Pencak silat has no single home, which is part of its claim to be national. The name itself is a compromise chosen in 1948: pencak was the Sundanese term used in West, Central and East Java, while silat was used in Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. The same year, the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association (IPSI) was founded to bring the many styles under one administration, and its rules became the de facto standard for silat competition worldwide. The international federation, Persilat, was founded in Jakarta on 11 March 1980 by the national bodies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.
The styles are tied to places. In West Java, the Cimande system was first taught publicly around 1760 by Embah Kahir in Cimande village near Sukabumi, and the town of Cianjur, seen as the heartland of Sundanese culture, is associated with the Cikalong or bat style. In West Sumatra the Minangkabau practise silek, with around ten major styles; IPSI recognises Silek Harimau, the low-crouching tiger style, as one of the oldest forms of pencak silat in existence. Minang silek movements also appear in randai, a traditional dance drama.
As a competitive sport, pencak silat made its debut at the 1987 Southeast Asian Games and at the 2018 Asian Games, both held in Indonesia. The Asian Games events ran from 23 to 29 August 2018 at the Pencak Silat Arena, the Padepokan, inside Taman Mini Indonesia Indah in East Jakarta, and the hosts won 14 of the 16 gold medals, with Vietnam taking the other two. Competition is split between tanding, full-contact sparring by weight class, and seni, judged artistic routines. On 12 December 2019 UNESCO inscribed the traditions of pencak silat on its intangible cultural heritage list, a recognition no Olympic medal could give badminton.
Jakarta also gave silat its widest audience. The Welsh director Gareth Evans was hired to direct a documentary about pencak silat, discovered Iko Uwais while making it, cast him in Merantau (2009) and then made The Raid (2011), an action thriller set in a Jakarta apartment block whose fight choreography was led by its stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and carried the art to cinemas far beyond the archipelago, and its sequel did the same.
Gelora Bung Karno, Kanjuruhan and the Pull of Football
For sheer crowd size, neither badminton nor silat matches football. The Gelora Bung Karno Main Stadium in Central Jakarta opened for the 1962 Asian Games with 110,000 seats; renovations reduced it to 88,306 in 2006 and to 77,193 single seats before the 2018 Asian Games. Persija Jakarta has since moved to the Jakarta International Stadium in Tanjung Priok, whose 82,000 seats make it the largest stadium in the country. The game has deep roots: the Football Association of Indonesia, PSSI, was founded on 19 April 1930, and as the Dutch East Indies the team became the first from Asia to play at a World Cup, losing its only match in Reims in June 1938.
Football also produced the deadliest football disaster in Asian history. On 1 October 2022, after Arema lost to Persebaya Surabaya at the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang Regency, East Java, fans invaded the pitch, riot police fired tear gas, and a crush at the exits killed 135 people and injured 583.
Every sport in this tour also meets at one moving venue. The Indonesian National Sport Committee, KONI, organises the National Sports Week, Pekan Olahraga Nasional, every four years, with hosting rotated among the provinces and athletes from every province competing. The government and KONI also mark National Sports Day on 9 September. Across the wider region, Indonesia joined the Southeast Asian Games in 1977, topped the medal table at its first attempt, and now ranks second only to Thailand in the all-time standings.
Older contests survive in the islands. On Madura, off East Java, karapan sapi bull races are held from about July to October: pairs of bulls yoked to wooden skids race 130 metres, with a final trophy race in Pamekasan, and the scene appeared on the 100-rupiah coin from 1991 to 1998. The Minangkabau of West Sumatra hold their own bull races, pacu jawi, and on Nias young men's lompat batu, leaping a stone tower, is a coming-of-age ritual that resembles athletics. None of these is a national sport, but together with silat they show a sporting culture older than any imported game.
Badminton's success is part of a wider Southeast Asian story told in our guide to the world's badminton powerhouses, while Malaysia, a co-founder of Persilat, chose a different game, as the page on the national sport of Malaysia explains; to see how Java, Sumatra, Madura and Nias fit on the map, start with our guide to the Indonesian islands.