🎾Competitions

Yes, from 2028. The IOC session in Mumbai voted on October 16, 2023 to add squash to the Los Angeles 2028 programme, alongside cricket, baseball and softball, flag football and lacrosse. The programme is singles events for men and women. It ends a long campaign: squash bid unsuccessfully for the 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 Games, losing to golf and rugby sevens for 2016 and to reinstated wrestling for 2020. The consequences go well beyond one fortnight. In most countries, national sports funding is tied to Olympic status, so federations that operated on subscriptions and volunteers now qualify for state high-performance money, which is reshaping coaching and junior programmes worldwide.

Modern squash uses point-a-rally scoring, or PAR: every rally is worth a point regardless of who served. Games are played to 11, and at 10-10 play continues until someone leads by two. Matches are best of five games, with 90 seconds between games. There is only one serve — no second serve — so a fault loses the rally outright. This system replaced the old English scoring, in which only the server could score and games ran to nine; the men's professional tour switched in 2004 and the World Squash Federation extended PAR to every level from the 2008-09 season. The change shortened matches significantly and pushed players toward attacking earlier, since long defensive rallies now carry a real cost.

Both concern interference, which is unavoidable when two players share one court. A let is a replayed rally with no point awarded: it is given when the opponent got in the way but made a genuine effort to clear, and the interfered player would have made a good return rather than a winning one. A stroke awards the point outright to the interfered player: it applies when the opponent did not make every effort to clear, when the striker's swing was blocked, when the ball would have hit the opponent on a direct path to the front wall, or when the striker would have hit a winner. If the striker could not have reached the ball anyway, or the interference was trivial, the referee calls no let and the appealing player loses the rally.

They indicate how much the ball bounces, which is really a measure of how much work you have to do. Blue and red dots are the liveliest and are made for beginners and cold courts, because the ball keeps bouncing without needing to be warmed up. A single yellow dot is slow, and the double yellow dot, standardized around 2000, is the extra-slow professional ball used in all serious competition. A double-yellow ball is almost dead when cold and must be warmed through several minutes of hard hitting before it plays properly, which is why matches begin with a five-minute knock-up. Beginners using a professional ball will find it simply does not bounce, which is the single most common reason people give up on squash.

Egypt has held roughly half of both the men's and women's world top tens through the 2020s, an unmatched concentration. The reasons are structural rather than mysterious. Egyptian sporting clubs in Cairo and Alexandria are family institutions with dense court provision, so children start young and play constantly. A coaching lineage runs from the pioneers through Amr Shabana and Ramy Ashour to today's academies, transmitting a distinctive attacking style built on deception, holds and front-court aggression. The domestic junior circuit is more competitive than most international ones. And there is a long history to build on: F.D. Amr Bey won five British Opens in the 1930s, so squash has been a prestige sport in Egypt for almost a century.

Forbes ranked squash first in its 2003 survey of the ten healthiest sports, scoring it on cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular endurance, calorie burn, strength, flexibility and injury risk. The logic holds up: squash combines near-continuous movement with repeated high-intensity efforts, rapid direction changes and deep lunges, all inside a heated, enclosed space, so heart rates sit high for long stretches and calorie expenditure per hour is among the highest of any recreational sport. The caveats are real, though. The same lunging load makes knee, hip and Achilles injuries common, and the intensity is not gentle on an unconditioned cardiovascular system. Eye injuries from the ball and racket are the reason protective eyewear is mandatory for juniors in most federations.