Lucia Francisca
Susi Susanti was
born in Tasikmalaya, West Java on
11 February 1971 is a retired Indonesian badminton player. Relatively small of
stature, she combined quick and graceful movement with elegant shotmaking
technique, and rates among the most successful players in the history of the
women's game. Sometimes her name is also spelled Susy Susanti.
She won the women's singles gold medal at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain and the bronze medal at the 1996
Olympic Games in Atlanta, United
States. She retired from the world badminton circuit not long after her
marriage to Alan Budikusuma (who
had also won a badminton singles gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics) in
February 1997. Susanti was the most dominant women's singles player in the
first half of the 1990s, winning the All-England in
1990, 1991, 1993 and 1994, the World Badminton Grand Prix finale five times consecutively from
1990 to 1994 as well as in 1996, and the IBF World Championships in 1993.
She is the only female player
to hold the Olympic, World Championship, and All-England singles titles
simultaneously. She won the Japan Open three
times and the Indonesian Open five
times. She also won numerous Badminton Grand Prix Series events and five Badminton World Cups. She led the
Indonesian team to victory over perennial champion China in the 1994 and 1996 Uber Cup (women's world team) competitions. All
of this came during a relatively strong period in women's international
badminton. Her chief competitors early in her prime years were the Chinese players Tang Jiuhong and Huang Hua, and, later, China's Ye Zhaoying and the Korean star Bang Soo-hyun.
Susanti was inducted into the International
Badminton Federation (IBF, currently BWF) Hall of Fame in May 2004, and
received the Herbert Scheele Trophy in
2002.
