There are sporting revolutions built in laboratories, and others built in moments.
Egyptian squash, now the most dominant force the sport has ever known, began with a convergence: a president obsessed with squash, a teenager with movie-star charisma, and a glass court beneath the Pyramids of Giza that made the game suddenly feel too big to ignore.
The images from the 1996 Al-Ahram International still look faintly surreal now. Floodlit glass walls standing in the desert. The silhouette of the pyramids looming behind players dressed in white. Thousands packed around the court as if attending a football match rather than a squash tournament.
And in the middle of it all stood Ahmed Barada. Young. Aggressive. Beautifully reckless.
An unseeded 19-year-old who arrived at the tournament as a talented local prospect and left it as a national obsession.
James Zug, the squash historian, remembers that week as the point where Egypt’s modern relationship with squash truly began.
“It’s broadcast live on TV,” Zug says. “President Hosni Mubarak drives up in a limousine - it’s all over the newspapers, it’s on the radio, it’s all over TV. People just went nuts about squash.”
The essential detail was visibility.
Squash had long existed in Egypt, but mostly behind walls; inside private clubs inherited from British colonialism, played by the upper classes, hidden from broader national consciousness.
The British had introduced the sport to Cairo and Alexandria in the early twentieth century, building clubs for colonial officers and diplomats. Egyptian ball boys and club workers absorbed the game from the margins. From those margins emerged the first great Egyptian champion: F. D. Amr Bey, who won six consecutive British Open titles during the 1930s.
His success inspired another Egyptian, Mahmoud Karim, who won four British Opens in the 1940s.
And then the momentum stalled.
Repeated wars, political instability and economic turbulence between the 1950s and 1980s fractured Egypt’s ability to compete internationally.
“All the top players left the country and lived in Europe, and that’s when the drop happened,” Amr Shabana later explained.
The best players who remained in Egypt often could not travel internationally. Squash survived, but quietly and yet, in hindsight, those isolated decades may have accidentally created the foundations of the sport’s future dominance.
Because Egypt’s remaining talent concentrated itself internally.
By the late 1980s, a 10-year-old Shabana and a 12-year-old Barada were training together at Cairo’s Maadi Club, surrounded by older players who had once competed internationally before political realities closed those pathways.
“There’s a quote that says ‘you’re only as good as the people around you,’” Shabana said. “Around us were the best players — maybe not the best in the world, but we thought they were.”
But perhaps the greatest advantage lay in Egypt’s competitive culture itself.
Young Egyptian players were not restricted to narrow age-group structures in the way juniors often were in England or the United States. A talented 10-year-old might play Under-12s, Under-14s, Under-16s, Under-19s and men’s events simultaneously.
Five matches a day was not unusual. In England, a junior might play one.
What Egypt accidentally created was density: more matches, more pressure, more problem-solving, more adaptation.
Years later, the rest of the world would call it a system. At the time, it simply felt normal.
Then came Hosni Mubarak.
Hosni Mubarak is an uncomfortable figure in modern Egyptian history, his presidency ultimately ending in revolution and removal from power in 2011. But within squash, his influence is impossible to separate from the sport’s rise.
Mubarak loved squash. Not symbolically. Literally.
“He wasn’t greatly talented,” former top-30 player Khaled Sobhy recalled. “But Mubarak was strong, a fighter, and he went after every shot.”
The president frequently played with Egypt’s top professionals throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The matches could feel slightly absurd: elite squash players carefully trying not to embarrass the president in front of watching military generals.
But Mubarak’s enthusiasm mattered.
“Of course if the president plays, it raises the sport’s profile,” national coach Amir Wagih explained.
Mubarak increased funding. Opened squash centres. Lent prestige to tournaments. Most importantly, alongside Al-Ahram newspaper and editor Ibrahim Hegazy, he helped bring the sport to the pyramids.
The Al-Ahram International was not merely a tournament. It was state-backed spectacle and it arrived at precisely the right moment.
Two years earlier, Barada had become the first Egyptian ever to win the World Junior Championships in 1994. That same year, Egypt’s boys team, featuring Barada, Omar El Borolossy, Wagih and Shabana, became the first Egyptian side to win the World Junior Team Championship.
The foundations were already forming but the Pyramids transformed momentum into mythology.
In the first staging of the event in 1996, Barada stormed to the final before losing to the great Jansher Khan.
The result barely mattered.
“A Star Is Born,” declared the front page of Al-Ahram.
Barada’s style - attacking, emotional, fearless - combined with his movie-star looks and the spectacle of the venue to create something squash had almost never produced before: a crossover celebrity.
“Everyone wanted to be like me,” Barada later reflected. “Those tournaments were on television, so people who’d never heard of squash were suddenly watching it. And there were 5,000 people in the stands.”
With only a handful of television channels in Egypt at the time, Barada became unavoidable.
Tarek Momen remembers the pull.
“Going to the events and watching Barada in the 1990s was a big thing for us junior players of the time,” he said. “We begged our parents to take us.”
And perhaps this was Barada’s greatest contribution.
Not the titles. Not even the rankings but the scale of imagination he created.
Before Barada, Egyptian squash possessed tradition. After Barada, it possessed ambition.
Barada won the Al-Ahram International himself in 1998 and eventually rose to world No.2. His career ended abruptly after being stabbed near his Cairo home in 2000, an attack never fully solved.
But by then, the movement had already escaped him because another young Egyptian had been watching closely.
Amr Shabana.
If Barada made squash glamorous, Shabana made Egypt dominant.
Where Barada was combustible and theatrical, Shabana was smoothness incarnate. A left-hander who seemed capable of slowing time itself, he played with such softness and deception that opponents often appeared to move half a second too late.
Shabana became the embodiment of that philosophy, then came Ramy Ashour, who turned improvisation into art.
Then Mohamed ElShorbagy. Then Farag. Then Raneem El Welily. Then Nour El Sherbini. Then Nouran Gohar. Then Hania El Hammamy. Then Mostafa Asal, Amina Orfi.
Each generation inheriting belief from the one before.
In 2003, Shabana became the first Egyptian in the modern era to win the World Open.
Barada had shown Egypt it could belong. Shabana proved Egypt could rule.
Since then, Egyptian players have dominated world squash with almost absurd consistency. Since Barada’s World Junior triumph in 1994, Egyptian boys have won 15 of the subsequent 22 World Junior titles. On the women’s side, Egyptians have claimed 16 of the last 17.
What began as a single spectacular tournament beneath the pyramids evolved into the most successful talent ecosystem the sport has ever seen.
The modern history of Egyptian squash begins there: beneath ancient stones, under desert lights, with Ahmed Barada at the centre of it all.
