In her new study, Friederike Trotier draws on the examples of Palembang and Jakarta to map the evolution of Indonesia’s sporting history, then uses her analysis as a lens to reflect on the country’s transformation since 1998. Here, she considers political aspirations and changes, power structures and global influences in the host country and its cities. She also scrutinizes the role of sports events in relation to national and local politics and links them to the increase in city marketing, local agency and inter-city competition in post-Suharto Indonesia. A key argument is that sports events reflect the country’s development in the past two decades from being nation-centric – where Jakarta had a dominant place – to being far more decentralized; here, in the new structure of regional autonomy, cities have a heightened role as arenas of representation. The result is an impressive revisualization of Indonesia’s recent sociopolitical transformation.