Alwi Farhan Trains With Kento Momota Before Asian Games 2026: Young Legs Learning How to Endure

At the end of a training session in Tokyo, Alwi Farhan bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing through his mouth, then straightened up and walked a lap around the court instead of stepping into the service position. Nobody wrote that movement into the session log. But stand at the edge of a court long enough and you can read it: the drill just finished ran longer than the rhythm his body is used to.

Across the net was Kento Momota, who retired in 2026. PBSI confirmed that Alwi Farhan shared a session with Momota during the final stage of preparation for the Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026. He said he was happy and felt honoured. The press called it a lesson. I want to know what that lesson cost.

People count points on the scoreboard; I count how many times a player reaches down to rub his thigh. The two rarely tell the same story.

There are injuries that never appear on a medical report. They live inside sessions nobody counts, three weeks before opening day, when a young player is pushed into rallies longer than anything he has played.

Alwi Farhan is a men's singles player whom PBSI has placed in the group being prepared for the next cycle. He came up through the junior ranks, has stood on the top step at the world junior level, and the 2026 Asian Games is described as his debut at a multi-sport Games. The Games open on 19 September 2026 in Aichi and Nagoya and run into early October. For Indonesian badminton this is a medal arena, not a development stop.

One structural detail is rarely mentioned: multi-sport Games such as the Asian Games generally do not carry BWF World Ranking points. For a player still building a career, that means ten days in Japan return no ranking, only a medal or nothing at all. The pressure therefore collapses into a single appearance.

In the same news cycle, a related headline claimed Alwi had just won the 2026 Australia Open. I am holding that fact in a pending state. It comes from a related article, not the main body, and I have not been able to cross-check the draw or the tier of the event. An unverified title cannot serve as the foundation for any conclusion about form.

What is more certain: he is in transition. Indonesian men's singles lived for years on two established names, Anthony Ginting and Jonatan Christie. A new generation has to squeeze in between two seniors who are still competing for places at major events. That pressure is not on court; it sits in the calendar, in having to enter more tournaments to accumulate points, and in the flights between two consecutive weeks.

The Tokyo camp is the last stage. The team's medical room keeps more secrets than the dressing room, and part of that is workload that is never published: how many sparring blocks, how many minutes, against whom, and who decides when to stop.

Momota's game stands on three pillars: retrieval, net control, and tolerance for long rallies. He does not win with a single killing smash. He wins by dragging opponents into a third game and still standing in the right place.

For a young attacking player, that is a shock to the rhythm. In my own tracking notebook, a young player usually closes a rally within four to seven shots. Against a retrieval specialist, that number is pushed to 15, 20, sometimes more. Every shot is a drop of the centre of gravity, a push-off, a change of direction. Added up across a two-hour session, the number of landings can exceed an official match. That is an estimate from how I count, not federation data.

The three structures that receive the bill first are the patellar tendon, the Achilles tendon and the ankle ligaments. They rarely tear in a single movement. They accumulate across weeks of high repetition, and the first sign is usually not sharp pain but heaviness, morning stiffness, or a slight sag on the last push-off of a game.

During the junior-to-senior transition, height and weight may already be adult-level, but tendon density and the endurance of connective tissue need another two or three seasons to catch up. A young body does not break because of one big match; it breaks because of a big load that arrives before it is ready.

The timing is what stands out. Three to four weeks before a major is the taper window. The general principle of peaking is to cut volume, keep intensity, and let the body recover and consolidate. Adding a long sparring block inside that window adds a variable to an already narrow equation.

The real technical value of the session lies elsewhere. A young attacking player learns from the best retriever something that is not defensive skill but shot selection. When you know your opponent will return everything, you are forced to build points over three or four shots instead of one. That can only be learned in live sparring, not from video.

Mechanically, a deep lunge in badminton puts the patellar tendon and the Achilles into a high-load zone, with forces at the planted leg that can exceed several times body weight. Repeated hundreds of times per session, across consecutive days, that is an accumulation problem. Tendons do not hurt immediately. They hurt on the fourth day, when you have already forgotten the session that caused it.

There is another layer few account for: a multi-sport Games does not operate like a BWF event. Athletes stay in a village, travel by bus, train in shared halls on rotation, warm up in corridors, and spend more hours standing and waiting than playing. None of that causes acute injury, but it erodes routine. A young player who lives on fixed sequence loses that sequence in the most important week of the year.

The second season after a breakthrough is the most dangerous one. Opponents already have footage of you, you have to enter more events to defend points, and the body is still maturing. Many young players stall not because of technique but because of a small injury that was never handled at the right moment.

In Japan the time difference with Jakarta is only two hours, small enough that nobody treats it as a problem, large enough to shift sleep. Sleep is the most underrated variable in sports medicine on short training camps.

A good medical staff does not wait for an athlete to complain. They measure in the morning: joint stiffness, jump height, asymmetry between the legs on landing. Cross a threshold and it is a sign the body is compensating, and prolonged compensation is the shortest road to injury.

The biggest lesson Momota leaves behind is not in any shot. It is this: a player whose career is built on retrieval is only himself when his body is at 100 percent. In January 2026, after the Malaysia Masters, he was in a car accident on the way to the airport, suffered an eye socket injury, and took a very long time to return to court. When he returned, his speed was a few percent down. For an attacking player, a few percent is a few points. For a defensive player, it is the entire system.

When he stayed silent for months after the accident, the media called it a mystery. The 2026 season taught me that silence in the right place is also a form of courage.

And there is something cameras cannot capture: fear. After an injury, athletes are not afraid of the opponent's smash. They are afraid of their own body. They start counting steps instead of moving on instinct, and in a sport where reaction is measured in hundredths of a second, counting means slowing down.

The headline called that session a lesson. Alwi's own quote speaks only of happiness and honour. The gap between the two is where memory is made, and technique is not.

A session with a legend, placed squarely inside the taper window, can be a net loss. It is not wrong as an image. It is wrong as load allocation.

And a retired player gives you a model, not pressure. Momota can hold a 20-shot rally with you all session. He cannot recreate the feeling of having to score at the end of a third game, in front of eight thousand people, with legs heavy and hands starting to shake. The one thing that cannot be simulated in a training hall is the fear of losing.

The source deserves a straight note as well. This story was supplied by the federation, and the federation has reasons to tell it: a young player learning from a legend sells, generates goodwill, and nobody has to answer hard questions about training volume. I do not doubt the session happened. I question the direction in which it was told, and which parts were left outside the frame.

The Tokyo session will not be measured by results in Aichi and Nagoya. It will be measured in March 2027, when Alwi Farhan walks into a major with his ankle and knee intact, and with a new habit: knowing when to stop before the body stops for him.

What does a young player learn from a retired one? Perhaps just one thing: people do not lose because they lack a shot. They lose because they no longer have the body to play that shot a twentieth time.