Squash

Squash asks its officials a question no other sport on this site asks: what would have happened?

The rules require a player to give their opponent unobstructed access to the ball, a free swing, and the ability to play it to the front wall. When that fails, the referee chooses between three outcomes. A let replays the point. A stroke awards it outright. No let means play should have continued.

Deciding between them requires answering a counterfactual — could the obstructed player have reached the ball, and would the shot have been a winner, and was the obstruction avoidable. Every other officiating decision on this site is about something that happened. Squash's central one is about something that did not.

That is why the sport uses three officials at professional level rather than one, voting on appeals, and why video review arrived in 2019 without settling anything. A camera shows where the players were. It does not show whether a player could have got there, or what they would have done if they had.

The comparison worth drawing is with fencing's priority and football's handball. All three are judgements about structure or intent rather than about position, and all three have resisted every instrument thrown at them. Squash's version is the hardest of the three, because it is explicitly hypothetical.

Everything else in squash officiates cleanly. The ball is in or it is not; the serve is legal or it is not. The sport has one problem, it has had it since the 1800s, and it comes directly from putting both players in the same box.

Squash's map is the British Empire again, with two significant additions and a serious structural problem underneath.

Egypt is the dominant nation by a distance, in both the men's and women's game, and has been for two decades — an unusually complete dominance built on a concentrated club system in Cairo and Alexandria and a coaching tradition that compounds. Pakistan's earlier dominance, through the Khan dynasty, was similar in kind and lasted from the 1950s into the 1990s.

Beyond those: England, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, France, and increasing strength in the United States.

The structural problem is the court. Squash needs a purpose-built enclosed space, and in Britain and Australia in particular those courts are being converted to gyms and studios, because a squash court is a poor use of floor area for a commercial operator. A sport losing facilities loses participants, and squash has been doing so in some of its historic strongholds for twenty years.

That makes the Olympic admission for 2028 more consequential than it would be for most sports here. Squash campaigned for a quarter of a century partly because visibility drives facility investment, and its federation has been explicit that the Games are a means to that end.

Egypt's rise is the counter-example and the encouraging one: a national concentration built without much wealth, on courts that already existed and a coaching culture that did not.

Squash was invented by accident, by schoolboys, in a game they were waiting to play.

At Harrow School in the nineteenth century, boys waiting for a court at rackets — a fast, hard-balled game played in a walled court, itself an Olympic sport in 1908 — knocked a punctured ball about against the walls outside. The punctured ball squashed on impact rather than rebounding hard, which made it slower, made it die in the corners, and produced a game requiring more retrieval and less raw power.

That is the whole origin, and the name is descriptive: the ball squashes.

Two inherited features still define the sport. The enclosed court, taken from rackets, means both players occupy the same space — every other racket sport on this site separates them with a net — and everything difficult in the rulebook follows from that. And the soft ball, which only performs properly once warmed by play, produces the long rallies that made squash a fitness sport and eventually a broadcast problem.

The international federation formed in 1967. Squash bid for the Olympic programme for 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 and was rejected each time, and was finally admitted for 2028 — twenty-four years after the scoring change made largely to secure it.

Squash's equipment history has one item nothing else on this site has: it rebuilt its playing area out of a different material so that people could watch.

A conventional squash court is a sealed box with four solid walls and a small gallery behind one of them. There is nowhere for a camera and nowhere for a crowd. For most of the sport's history it was genuinely unwatchable — not uninteresting, physically impossible to see.

The all-glass court, from the early 1980s, solved it. Championship squash is now played in a transparent box that can be assembled anywhere, in a railway station or in front of the Pyramids, with an audience on all four sides. It is the only case here of a sport changing the substance of its venue for the sole purpose of being visible.

The tin is the other structural change. The out-of-play strip at the bottom of the front wall was lowered from nineteen inches to seventeen for professional men's play in 2001, enlarging the target and rewarding a player who attacks rather than retrieves. Adjusting a court dimension to change how a sport is played is the same instrument basketball used with its three-point arc and fencing used with its timing constants.

The ball is graded by speed, and the professional ball is the slowest, because a slower ball produces longer rallies. It only behaves correctly once warm, which makes it the only implement on this site whose properties depend on how long play has been going on.

Rackets went from wood to composite without a comparability crisis, because squash keeps no numbers a racket could break.

Squash's governance for the last quarter of a century has been a single project: getting into the Olympic Games. It bid for 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024, was rejected each time, and was admitted for 2028.

Read the rule changes on this page in that light and they stop being separate decisions. The glass court made the sport filmable. Point-a-rally scoring in 2004 made match length predictable. Lowering the tin in 2001 shortened rallies and rewarded attacking play. Video review in 2019 addressed the sport's most visible officiating weakness.

Each is defensible on its own terms and the cumulative direction is unmistakable. Squash is the clearest case on this site of a federation redesigning its sport to satisfy an external admissions criterion, and — unlike modern pentathlon, which is doing the same thing to stay in — it worked.

That should be recorded carefully, because the causal claim is unusually strong. Most sports here changed a rule and then discovered the consequences. Squash's federation stated the objective, made the changes, and got the result, over twenty-four years.

The internal politics is the usual professional-tour question. The men's and women's tours are commercially separate from the federation, prize money parity was achieved comparatively early, and the professional game adopted point-a-rally before the amateur game did — the same order badminton's change followed, and for the same reason: the tour has the broadcast contracts.

Nobody could see it. Squash's founding problem was not a scandal. A conventional court is a sealed box with a small gallery, and there is nowhere to put a camera or a crowd. A sport that cannot be watched cannot be sold, and squash spent decades in that position.

The all-glass court in the 1980s is one of the more elegant solutions on this site: rather than change the game, change what the walls are made of.

Matches that would not end. Under hand-in hand-out scoring, only the server could score, so a game had no bounded length. A world-class match could run past two hours with the scoreboard barely moving, and no broadcaster could schedule it.

Point-a-rally scoring in 2004 fixed that and severed the sport's statistics doing it — the fourth federation on this site to make exactly that trade in seven years, after volleyball, table tennis and before badminton.

Attrition. By 2000 elite squash had become a fitness contest: rallies of enormous length, decided by who broke first. Lowering the tin by two inches enlarged the target and rewarded a player who went for a winner, which is a physical change to the court made to alter the character of the sport.

The let. Squash's permanent controversy and the one nothing has fixed. Because both players share the court, interference is constant, and the referee must decide between a let, a stroke and no let — three outcomes turning on what would have happened. Video review arrived in 2019 and has informed those calls without making them any less contested.

Recorded as unsettled.

The let. Still the sport's central dispute and still unresolved. Video review informs it and cannot decide it, because the question is what would have happened rather than what did. Proposals to reduce the referee's discretion — by defining interference more tightly, or by removing the stroke as an outcome — circulate and have not been adopted, because every tighter definition produces its own unfairness.

Whether the tin should come down further. Lowering it in 2001 shortened rallies and rewarded attacking play, and there is a live argument that it did not go far enough and that elite squash remains attritional. The counter is that squash's rallies are the sport, and shortening them further makes it something else.

Courts. The sport is losing facilities in several of its traditional strongholds because a squash court is a commercially poor use of floor space. No rule can fix this, and Olympic inclusion is the federation's stated strategy for reversing it.

Whether twenty-four years of redesign was worth it. Squash changed its walls, its scoring, its court dimensions and its officiating largely in pursuit of Olympic admission, and got it in 2023 for 2028. Whether the sport that will appear at those Games is better than the one that started campaigning, or merely more televisable, is a question its own players disagree about.