Alwi Farhan Trains with Momota Ahead of Asian Games 2026: A Young Player Learns to Endure

In the final training session in Tokyo before departing for the Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026, Alwi Farhan stood across the net from Kento Momota. No spectators. No electronic scoreboard. No one shouting his name. Just two men, a shuttlecock, and a court 13.4 meters long.

I remember an afternoon in 2026 in Binh Duong, when I was assigned to cover the national athletics championships. I stood for two hours by the fence of the women's 400m hurdles, just to watch Nguyen Thi Oanh — then ranked seventh overall — take her unusual strides. She finished fifth. I still wrote a long analytical piece about her, and it sparked heated debate among the professionals. I did not choose journalism; journalism chose me on the track in 2026. Since then, I have learned one thing: sporting truth does not live in the scoreboard, but in the details nobody bothers to look at.

The scene of Alwi training with Momota is the same. It is not glamorous. But that is where the truth is born.

A young player and a retired legend

Alwi Farhan, an Indonesian men's singles player born in 2026, is entering the phase of transition from the junior ranks to the professional circuit. He has just been placed by PBSI — the Badminton Association of Indonesia — into a final training camp in Tokyo ahead of the Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026. According to PBSI sources, this is the final preparation stage before the continental arena, where Alwi will make his debut at a multi-sport Games.

On the other side of the net is Kento Momota, the former Japanese world No. 1 who has closed his competitive career and now appears as an elite sparring partner. For Alwi, hitting with Momota is an honor. He says so himself: happiness, pride, the thrill of trading shots with someone he once admired on screen.

But read closely and an interesting gap appears. The headline uses the word "lesson." Yet Alwi's actual quote speaks only of emotion: happiness, honor, pride. Not a single technical detail. No smash, no shuttle speed, no rally length, no error rate. The distance between the flashy headline and the candid quote is itself the signature of a report chasing emotion rather than analysis.

I do not blame the writer. I only want to look into that gap, because that is where I usually find the real story.

What does Momota leave in a single session?

Let us talk about the technical essence of training with Momota. The peak-era Momota was not a destructive attacking player. He was a defensive counter-attacker, a rally controller, a survivor of long exchanges. Facing such a player in training, a young attacking talent learns the hardest lesson of all: patience.

When you play someone who specializes in retrieving, every beautiful smash comes back. You begin to understand that a pretty shot does not beat a persistent one. You are forced to learn timing, to build rallies, to endure when the opponent refuses to die. This is the kind of lesson no scoreboard can ever teach.

Between the football pitch and the running track, between eSports and the transfer market, I find a common pulse. In football, a resilient defense teaches a young striker that goals come not from a single sprint, but from ten acts of persistence. On the track, a 400m hurdler learns to distribute energy across each barrier rather than simply sprinting flat out. In tennis, a young player facing a specialist in endurance learns that points come from keeping the ball in play, not from a pretty winner. Badminton follows the same logic.

But this is my inference, not a fact stated in the original article. I must be honest about that. A single training session is too small a sample to draw conclusions from. No one can claim what Alwi will become after one hitting session with Momota.

A title, and a question mark

What is notable is that, alongside the training story, a related headline reports that Alwi Farhan won the Australia Open 2026. This is a compelling data point, but it comes from a related article rather than the main report, so I place it at only moderate reliability, pending independent verification.

If the title is genuine, it marks a significant step forward. The Australia Open sits in the Super 500 tier — the middle rung of the BWF World Tour system, not the highest, but hardly a village tournament. Winning such an event in one's early twenties is a positive signal for a rising player.

What is concerning is that this result could push media and fan expectations far beyond the actual foundation. World Cup 2026 taught me that stars are not born in the stands, but in the grit of the scramble. But it also taught me that a single flash of brilliance can be inflated into a legend before the legend has had time to form.

I witnessed that at the 2026 World Cup in Russia, when I abandoned my plan to write about Ronaldo and rushed into Morocco's press conference to interview Achraf Hakimi — then just 19 years old. I wrote a three-part series on the new generation of wingers. Hakimi was also a new star then, and I learned to distinguish real talent from a story that has been woven.

The Asian Games are not the BWF World Tour

One thing many fans confuse needs to be made clear: the Asian Games is a multi-sport event, not part of the BWF World Tour system. Its value lies in national honor and medals, not in standard ranking points. Typically, multi-sport Games do not carry standard BWF World Ranking points — this point requires further verification, but it completely changes how results should be read.

For a player making his Games debut like Alwi, the pressure comes not only from opponents on court. It comes from the athletes' village, from a multi-day schedule, from national media attention, from the expectations of an entire badminton nation that was once very strong in men's singles but is now undergoing a generational transition.

In Indonesia, men's singles once placed its faith in Anthony Ginting and Jonatan Christie. Alwi Farhan is seen as the spearhead of the next cycle. A final training camp in Tokyo, where he gets to hit with a legend, shows that PBSI is making a serious bet on him. This is not a participation slot to fill out a roster. This is an investment.

Looking from the other side

There is one detail I want to linger on longer: the fact that Japan still maintains a training resource as elite as Momota after his retirement. This says that Japanese badminton does not merely produce stars, but also preserves the behind-the-scenes ecosystem to nurture the next generation.

This is exactly the kind of detail I always look for. Stars only appear in the stands; the real miracle is born in the scramble. Momota no longer competes for medals, but he is still in the gym, still part of the development machine. The person with no name on the poster is the most important person in the training hall.

In 2026, when the pandemic froze every tournament, I fell into a state of deep dejection, unable to write a word for three weeks. Then I realized I could still run with my imagination. I contacted 15 national track-and-field athletes, persuaded them to film their training at home, and created the column "Athletics in the Time of Pandemic" — 300,000 reads in two months. The lesson that year was: when the spotlight goes out, true value lies with those still grinding away in the dark.

A contrarian view: beware the torch-passing story

This is where I want to speak plainly, even if it runs against the current.

The story of "a young player learning a lesson from an old legend" is a beautiful story. Too beautiful. And precisely because it is so beautiful, it easily becomes a trap of expectation.

Look at its structure. One training session. One emotional quote. One related headline about a title. Combined, it makes a perfect torch-passing story to share, yet it is very thin on competitive information. No ranking. No head-to-head. No match statistics. No tactical detail.

My trade taught me that when a story is told too smoothly, something is usually being left out. Here, what is left out is the distance between one training session and one medal. Between a feeling of honor and the capacity to withstand the pressure of a Games. Between a Super 500 title and a knockout match against the top players of Asia.

I am not saying Alwi lacks talent. I am saying we do not yet have enough evidence to assert anything. In sport, the truth usually lies between two extremes: between glorification and demolition.

PBSI is the source of this article. That means the story is managed and curated for communication purposes. A federation always has reason to tell the story of its young player in a positive light. There is nothing wrong with that, but the reader should know what they are reading.

Technology and the invisible things

Speaking of invisible things, I recall Qatar 2026. When Neymar left the pitch in the 79th minute of the Brazil — Serbia match with an ankle injury, every colleague rushed to write about Brazil's future. I was haunted by a different detail: Femi Ogunode, the Qatari track-and-field athlete, sitting in the stands with a special pair of shoes. I abandoned my main piece, interviewed him about carbon-plate shoe technology, and wrote a five-part series on how shoe technology changed the history of athletics and football.

I tell that story not to boast. I tell it to say that, in an article about Alwi and Momota, what I am most curious about is what is not written: the shoes Alwi wears, the racket he uses, how he eats and recovers, how the PBSI team analyzes opponents. Those details are where the real story of a rising young player is told.

A transfer is not a story of numbers; it is a story of farewells at a sprint. A player's growth is the same: it is not in the big headlines, but in the training sessions no one sees.

What to watch

If I had to bet on the signals worth watching this cycle, I would choose three.

First, Alwi's results at the Asian Games 2026. If he reaches the quarterfinals or beyond, the new-star narrative will have a foundation. If he exits early, the very headlines now glorifying him will be the thing that turns to bite him.

Second, his world ranking on the BWF table. If he enters the top 16 or top 8, his path in major tournaments will widen, and his seeding position will change the picture.

Third, Momota's post-retirement role. If he formally becomes part of the coaching system, that is a signal of a sustainable development chain in Japanese badminton — and a lesson for the whole region.

What remains

When every camera leaves the Tokyo gym, when the headline has been published, when the fans have finished sharing, what remains is a young player standing alone on the court, rehearsing the movement he just learned. No one photographs that moment. But that is precisely the decisive moment.

I believe sport is the common language of humanity. A young Indonesian and a retired Japanese legend can meet through a shuttlecock, no interpreter needed. That is the most beautiful thing sport can do.

But I also believe that love alone is not enough to win a Games. The question is not what Alwi learned from Momota in that session, but whether he can carry that lesson into a real match, under real pressure, against a real opponent, with an entire nation watching. And that answer, only the court in Aichi-Nagoya can give.