Squash in 20: Clearing and the right to the ball

8 each — Jansher Khan (1987-1996) and Nicol David (2005-2014) Squash is played inside a sealed box measuring 9.75 by 6.4 meters, and that enclosure is the whole point. Because both players share the same space and hit into the same front wall, there is no net to separate them and no side of the court to defend — only a permanent negotiation over territory, angles and the right to swing. The ball, a hollow rubber sphere about 40 millimeters across, barely bounces when cold and dies in the back corners even when warm. Everything the sport asks of a player follows from those two facts: control the middle, and make the opponent travel further than you do.

No racket sport punishes fitness gaps more brutally. A single elite game can last twelve minutes of near-continuous movement, with lunges, direction changes and recoveries repeating every two or three seconds and no serve clock or between-point walk to hide behind. Forbes ranked squash the healthiest sport in the world in its 2003 survey, weighing cardiorespiratory load, muscular endurance and calorie burn, and the professional game bears that out: five-game matches routinely pass 90 minutes, and the longest recorded competitive match, Jahangir Khan against Gamal Awad in 1983, ran two hours and 46 minutes with a single rally lasting five and a half minutes.

Its geography is genuinely global and rarely where outsiders expect. Invented by schoolboys at Harrow in the 1830s and codified by the English, the sport was seized in the 1950s by a family of court professionals from Peshawar, dominated for four decades by Pakistan, contested throughout by Australia and New Zealand, ruled in the women's game by a Malaysian who spent 112 straight months at world number one, and owned in the modern era by Egypt, whose academies now supply most of the world's top ten. After five failed Olympic bids, squash finally enters the Games at Los Angeles in 2028.