Badminton in Indonesia and China Part 3

Cold War Games

In November 1963, less than a year before the Tokyo Olympics, socialists from around the world gathered in Jakarta to hold their own Games, in a direct challenge to the IOC.

Sukarno, the left-leaning president of Indonesia, felt that the Second and Third Worlds were being ignored by the First, and he hoped to restore the balance of sporting power.

The football tournament included a North Korean team which would go on to shock the world, by beating Italy at the 1966 World Cup. It played Egypt in the final but, when the match remained level after extra time, it was decided on a coin toss. The locals favoured North Korea, and there was riotous behaviour when Lady Luck gave the title to Egypt.

The undoubted star of the Games was another North Korean, Sin Kim-Dan. She claimed three gold medals and her times for the 400m and 800m were unratified world records.

Unfortunately, the IAAF took a dim view of her attendance and she was banned from competing in Tokyo. Had she done so, she would surely have won the same two races again, and beaten both Betty Cuthbert of Australia and Ann Packer of Great Britain.

The strangest event was the team badminton competition. Indonesia, as the world champion, was expected to win easily. In the final, it faced China, whose unheralded players included Tang Xian Hu and Hou Jia Chang, who had been born in Indonesia.

But the Chinese team proved to be far superior to that of the host, which was missing its hero, Ferry Sonneville, and it dominated the tie. This was humiliating for Indonesia but also embarrassing for China, for whom GANEFO was, in part, a diplomatic venture.

Blushes were spared all round when Tang crumbled in the final rubber. Or so it seemed.

In fact, as Tang later admitted, he had been instructed to deliberately lose the match by Chinese officials, as part of the policy of “friendship first competition second”. He acted much like the players who threw games at London 2012 but, rather than wanting to get a better draw, he had a political motive instead. This was Cold War diplomacy in action.

There would be no more global GANEFO Games. Sukarno was overthrown in 1965 in a Western-backed coup, while China turned against sport during the Cultural Revolution. Indonesia was quietly readmitted to the IOC and the Olympics continued unharmed.

The stadium where the Games took place is now named after Sukarno and often hosts football matches featuring touring European clubs. In the summer of 2014, Juventus came to visit and it was filled with Indonesians decked out in black and white (above).

Juventus made it clear that the purpose of the match was to tap into the Asian market, an outcome which might have made Sukarno smile. Capitalism had won the Cold War but the sporting supremos in the West could not afford to ignore Indonesia any longer.

Next week: How canoeing in Hungary benefits from its location on the river Danube

Badminton in Indonesia and China Part 2

By the early 1960s, Indonesia was the top badminton nation in the world. The sport had arrived in Medan in the 1930s, when advertisements for equipment started to appear in local newspapers, and it then spread firstly through the Chinese minority community, who invited Malaysian Chinese players over from Penang to play in exhibition matches.

But it soon also caught on with the rest of the population, producing international stars such as Ferry Sonneville (above). Sonneville led Indonesia to victory in the 1958 Thomas Cup, succeeding Malaysia as champions, and beat Erland Kops of Denmark on the way.

The government then made a momentous decision. It placed citizenship restrictions on people of Chinese ancestry born in Indonesia. Many of them chose to depart for China, including some promising young badminton players. China gained a team from nothing.

I have previously outlined the three ways in which sports move from country to country, imperial expansion, movement between neighbouring countries and immigration. All three are required to explain badminton’s route from Great Britain to China: via empire to Malaysia; across the sea to Indonesia; and then through enforced migration to China.

In 1961, Indonesia retained the Thomas Cup, completing a double which was celebrated on a postage stamp (above). But despite its poor treatment of its Chinese people, it was beginning to form closer political ties with China and, when it hosted the Asian Games in 1962, it would find itself on a collision course with the administrators of global sport.

Before Nixon, China was excluded from most international competition. Only the table tennis federation, led by British communist, Ivor Montagu, allowed it to be a member.

But Indonesia invited its ally to the Asian Games in Jakarta, even sending blank pieces of paper instead of identity cards to the delegation from Taiwan. Its IOC membership was suspended as a result and Indonesia reacted by creating its own Olympic Games.

The event took place in Jakarta in November 1963 and was known as the Games of the New Emerging Forces. Teams from newly independent countries in Asia and Africa were invited, alongside major powers from the Communist world, including, of course, China.

The badminton tournament was a rare opportunity for Indonesia to face China, which had never played in the Thomas Cup, and whose team included several Indonesian-born stars. It would finally be possible to determine the best badminton nation in the world.

Next week: The GANEFO Games and the most bizarre game of badminton ever played