After four decades of campaigning, squash finally earned a coveted berth at the Olympic Games. This week squash was promptly granted the most meagre real estate on the LA28 roster.
Sixteen men. Sixteen women. No teams. No doubles. Just 32 athletes.
This is what inclusion looks like now — tidy, efficient, small enough to slot between flag football and a rowing final.
The news arrived like a thud. In France, Camille Serme was asked for her reaction.
“What? Are you serious?”
She had returned to the tour after having a baby, shoulders still square with the weight of the Olympic dream. She wasn’t alone. For players like Nour El Sherbini and Mohamed ElShorbagy — legends by any other measure — LA28 was to be the golden epilogue. A closing chapter under five rings.
Instead, the book has been halved, and their names may not make the final edit.
“Well,” Serme added, “that makes it even more difficult.”
Difficult might be understating it. On Wednesday, the IOC Executive Board confirmed what many feared and few expected.
The anticipated 32-player draws — long discussed, softly promised — had been quietly slashed. Just sixteen players of each gender. Thirty-two in total. The smallest individual sport in the Games.
For comparison, BMX freestyle will feature twelve athletes per gender. Trampolining, sixteen. But both belong to larger sporting families — cycling and gymnastics, respectively. Squash, proudly independent and desperately unfashionable, stands alone.
It is, by any measure, a hammer blow. The kind you feel not just in rankings or qualification charts, but in the stomach. US Squash and the WSF had spoken openly of 32-player draws. The plan was clear: two players per top nation, plus a spread of global qualifiers. Something fair, broad, dignified.
Now the dream is folded neatly in half.
And yet, as the outrage simmers, a less obvious, less romantic, but no less necessary question emerges.
What if this is exactly what squash needs?
Let’s not sugar-coat it. The disappointment is real. This is a huge blow to the players for whom LA28 represents their only chance to become an Olympian.
But squash has never been an easy sell. Not to broadcasters. Not to casual fans. Not to the IOC, who have seen the glossy pitch decks, the glass courts in iconic locations, the slow-motion replays over orchestral music. Squash got into LA28 on merit — on discipline, persistence, and the nagging, unanswerable question: why not us?
But merit, as it turns out, doesn’t fill seats or spike ratings.
And this is Los Angeles — where the Games are unapologetically shaped by television, spectacle, and local market appeal.
Squash was one of five sports added to the roster for 2028. Cricket is in. With a billion viewers and 180 athletes. Baseball, back for another swing, brings 234 players. Flag football — barely a sport, but shiny with NFL dollars — has been ushered in with grinning enthusiasm.
Squash is in. But only just.
But then again, maybe that’s the point and maybe the IOC has done squash a strange sort of favour.
Because if squash is going to make its debut on the biggest stage in sport, the best possible advert might not be mass participation or global representation. It might be quality. Sharp, brutal, elite-level quality. Not squash for squash’s sake. But squash that stuns. Squash that captivates. Squash where every match — from round one onwards — looks and feels like a final.
Consider the alternative. A 32-player draw, capped at two players per country, would have guaranteed geographic spread but the result would almost certainly have been a first round littered with mismatches, forgettable, even unwatchable. A global first impression, offered in standard definition.
The IOC doesn’t care how many countries play squash. It cares whether the product works on TV.
So when you do have the world’s attention — for the first time — the absolute worst thing you can do is waste it on a 30-minute demolition job between the World No.3 and a regional qualifier who’s just glad to be there.
A 16-player draw is cruel. But it’s also clinical.
It distils the field. It avoids the bloated excess of the universality quota, which often does little more than fill the air with Olympic platitudes. It means every match, from day one, could feature a line up akin to a Platinum event quarter-final.
Squash is not an easy sell to casual viewers. It’s fast, technical, complicated to the untrained eye. It doesn’t lend itself easily to new viewers. It needs context. Stakes. Narrative. And the one thing a 16-player Olympic draw will guarantee is stakes.
The pressure to qualify will be savage. But the drama, once the Games begin, will be undeniable and it gives squash a shot to prove it belongs among the best, by literally putting its best players on screen.
It’s hard, of course, for players to see it that way.
Of course, it doesn’t feel fair. Players like Serme, who only this week was named in France’s team for the European Championships, were left stunned.
“It’s a discussion I will have to go away and have with my team,” she said. “I guess they’ll say, ‘Well, we’ve started the process, so let’s take it all the way.’ But that doesn’t make a lot of room. That’s shocking.”
And it is. Shocking, bitter, vaguely ridiculous.
But also: real. The Games have always been political. Squash, long the bridesmaid, is now standing awkwardly at the altar. There is no point pretending this is what anyone wanted. But it is what we’ve been given.
So what now? Squash recalibrates.
For a sport that has long complained of being overlooked, this is a cruel twist of fate. But also: a gift in disguise. The Olympics doesn’t owe squash anything. If squash wants to stay, it has to make itself essential. It has to thrill.
It won’t feel fair. It may not even feel right.
But it might just work.
