JAKARTA - For the first time, the Red and White badminton squad tried to practice in the main arena of the 2021 Indonesia Badminton Festival (IBF) competition which took place at the Bali International Convention Center, Nusa Dua, Sunday.
In this training session, players from the women's doubles and mixed doubles sectors were the first group to have the opportunity to try out the main arena for the Indonesia Masters, Indonesia Open, and BWF World Tour Finals matches.
"We were still adjusting, because the wind conditions were very different from Istora (Senayan, Jakarta)," said Greysia Polii, as reported by Antara.
According to the Tokyo Olympics gold medalist, the non-permanent indoor arena has a different character than the permanent arena.
With this condition, it is only the ability of the athlete who has to speak to be able to adapt the character of the game to the type of field.
"We can't say it's good or not, we have to make it good with our own game. Another thing that makes the difference here is that there are no spectator seats and the arena is not too big," Greysia explained.
At the IBF 2021 event, the organizing committee provided a total of nine fields with each consisting of three main playing fields inside the BICC hall, and two warm-up fields and four practice fields housed in two large tent buildings outside the auditorium building.
Meanwhile, mixed doubles badminton player Gloria Emanuelle Widjaja was quite satisfied with the duration of the practice session in the main arena which took up to one hour.
In contrast to Greysia, Gloria admitted that she was able to master the field conditions, especially for the indoor wind which is the main concern for athletes.
Furthermore, he just needs to keep his focus so that he can control the direction of the blow, considering that the match situation in the IBF 2021 arena will be more difficult because the field facilities are different from conventional arenas.
"Just keep your focus to keep going, because the wind is difficult to control the ball. In the first field, the wind is pretty good, a bit to the middle. But the corner is still okay, and the ball is quite heavy. Even though it's windy, it can still be handled," said Gloria.
The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language. (system supported by DigitalSiber.id)
