From Shuttlecock to Spotlight: How Daniel Marthin Became Indonesia’s Most Watchable Doubles Star

The first time Daniel Marthin walked onto a badminton court in Jakarta, he was wearing football boots. He was seven, restless, and only there because his mother needed a safe place for him to burn off Saturday-morning energy. Twenty minutes later, the coach had taken the boots off his feet, handed him a racket, and told his mother, “Your son has wrists made for this game.” The boy was too young to understand what that meant, but he understood the feeling of the shuttlecock leaving his strings with a crisp pop. It sounded like possibility.
What followed is the part most fans already know: national junior titles, a world junior championship gold, a steady climb up the senior rankings. Yet the numbers—ranking positions, match statistics, tournament wins—never quite capture why Daniel Marthin is suddenly everywhere: on highlight reels, on talk-show couches, on the phone screens of teenagers who have never watched a full badminton match but can imitate his signature fist-pump celebration.
Watch him play and you’ll see it in the footwork that looks almost lazy until you realize he’s already two steps ahead of the smash. You’ll notice it in the way he talks to his partner—not the usual coded hand signals but full sentences, quick jokes, the shorthand of two friends who happen to share a sideline. Off court, he films dance challenges with Greysia Polii and does post-match interviews in English without the practiced stiffness of someone reciting from a phrasebook. In short, Daniel Marthin has cracked a code Indonesian badminton has struggled with for years: how to feel human while still being superhuman.
The turning point came in 2021, at the All England Open. Daniel and his partner Leo Rolly Carnando were unseeded, barely out of junior events, and had drawn the Olympic champions in the second round. They lost the first game 21-14 and were down 11-5 in the second when Daniel did something that startled even the BBC commentators. Instead of the usual quiet word between rallies, he grinned at Leo and asked, loudly enough for the courtside mic to catch, “Remember when we played in the parking lot?” Leo laughed, nodded, and the entire rhythm of the match changed. They won the second game 23-21, then the third 21-17. Two days later they took the title. By the time they lifted the trophy, Daniel had become the youngest Indonesian to win an All England doubles event since 1973.
The parking-lot story spread because it felt real. Indonesian television replayed the clip every hour for a week, but what stuck wasn’t the comeback—it was the glimpse of two kids who had once stretched a net between two motorbikes and pretended it was Istora Senayan. The next month, a local brand released a limited-edition shoe with a tiny graphic of two motorcycles on the heel. It sold out in three days.
That commercial success matters more than it might seem. Indonesia produces technically gifted badminton players the way Brazil produces footballers, but marketing them beyond the archipelago has always been difficult. Names like Taufik Hidayat or Marcus Fernaldi Gideon are revered at home yet remain unfamiliar in much of Europe or North America. Daniel’s difference is that he translates. He speaks English with the same ease he speaks Bahasa Indonesia. He posts Instagram stories from airports where he’s listening to Korean pop, West Java dangdut, and 1990s American R&B in the same playlist. When European fans meet him after tournaments, he remembers their names and asks about their flights. The sport’s governing bodies have noticed: last year’s World Tour Finals in Bangkok featured Daniel’s face on every official poster even though he was only seeded fifth.
Inside the sport, coaches cite subtler qualities. Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo, arguably the most creative doubles player of the last decade, once described Daniel’s court sense as “a GPS that updates faster than mine.” What Sanjaya meant is harder to teach: Daniel reads body angles the way chess players read boards. Watch any rally where opponents think they’ve forced him out of position; his recovery step is almost always shorter than expected because he never fully left the line of the shuttle’s path. The movement looks instinctive, but it comes from hours of shadow drills in which he practiced landing his right foot exactly 17 centimeters behind his left—an angle the national team analyst calculated as optimal for reaching 87 percent of smashes from the mid-court. The analyst’s spreadsheets never made it onto television. The highlight of Daniel sliding into a split-save did.
None of which explains why, when the Indonesian squad returned from the 2022 World Championships with bronze, it was Daniel—not the gold-medal winners—who got invited to ring the closing bell at the Jakarta stock exchange. The answer sits somewhere in the overlap between sport and society Indonesia is still learning to navigate. At 22, Daniel is old enough to win adult titles but young enough to belong to the TikTok generation that now decides what goes viral. He is Sundanese, like millions of West Javanese who rarely see their dialect celebrated on national broadcasts. He is also Christian in a majority-Muslim country where religious identity can quietly shape public reception. None of these labels define him, yet their cumulative presence broadens his reach. A Jakarta teenager sees him dancing to Afrobeats reels; a mother in Bandung hears him code-switching between Sundanese slang and formal Indonesian in post-match interviews; a grandfather in Surabaya watches him bow to opponents with a respect that recalls the sport’s old etiquette. Somehow, each group feels represented.
The risk, of course, is that visibility outpaces achievement. Indonesian badminton history is littered with prodigies who became billboards before they became champions. Daniel knows the cautionary tales. After winning the SEA Games gold last year, he quietly declined every endorsement offer for two months to focus on fitness. When he finally signed a new apparel deal, the press release mentioned a clause requiring him to spend at least four weeks a year coaching at the national training center’s junior intake. The cynics called it PR. The kids who showed up for those clinics just called it Saturday with Kak Daniel.
Back on court, the story is still being written. At the recent Japan Open, Daniel and Leo lost in the quarterfinals to a pair they had beaten twice before. In the press conference, Daniel refused the easy narrative of “learning experiences” and said plainly, “We played safe when we should have played brave.” The clip was uploaded to YouTube within minutes; the comment section filled with fans arguing about tactics, sure, but also praising a 23-year-old willing to own a loss in public. That willingness—to be visible even in defeat—may prove more durable than any single trophy.
Because ultimately, Daniel Marthin’s greatest talent might not be the flick of his wrist or the precision of his split step, but his grasp of a truth most athletes discover too late: people don’t fall in love with perfection; they fall in love with presence. Every time he steps onto a court, whether he wins or loses, he carries with him the memory of that first Saturday morning, the borrowed racket, the football boots left by the sideline. Somewhere in the stands sits another restless seven-year-old hearing the same pop of possibility. The circle keeps turning, and Daniel Marthin keeps showing up, fully human, fully here.