Jahangir Khan
Nicol David
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Jahangir Khan at #1 and Nicol David at #4.
The case for Jahangir Khan
The holder of the longest winning streak in professional sport: 555 consecutive matches unbeaten over five years and eight months, from a British Open final loss to Geoff Hunt in November 1981 until Ross Norman beat him in the 1986 World Open final in Toulouse. He had already won the world amateur title at 15 and the World Open at 17 in 1981, still the youngest men's world champion. He finished with six World Opens and ten consecutive British Opens from 1982 to 1991, sixteen majors in all, built on a length game so accurate and a fitness base so deep that opponents described facing him as an interrogation rather than a match. His 1983 win over Gamal Awad lasted 2 hours 46 minutes, the longest recorded competitive squash match. Son of the great Roshan Khan and nephew of Hashim, he later served as president of the World Squash Federation. No one else in squash combines that peak with that duration.
The case for Nicol David
The most dominant player of squash's fully professional era and the reason the sport has a mass audience in Southeast Asia. David held the women's world number one ranking for 112 consecutive months, from August 2006 to September 2015, the longest unbroken reign at the top in squash history for either sex. She won a record eight World Championships between 2005 and 2014 and five British Opens, thirteen majors in all, and added Commonwealth Games singles gold in 2010 and 2014 along with a long run of Asian titles. Her game was built on relentless retrieval, immaculate length and a movement style so efficient that opponents complained she never looked hurried. She was the first Asian player of either sex to top the world rankings, was voted world player of the year repeatedly, and retired in 2019 as Malaysia's most decorated athlete in any sport.