One day in the summer of 2019, 17-year-old Louie Martin started to feel unwell. Shaking, feverish and fatigued, he pulled out of Chichester Squash Club’s first team match that evening. His hiatus from the squash court turned out to be horrifically long and arduous.
Louie had been ranked no.2 in England at U15 level (behind Sam Todd) and was a contemporary of Curtis Malik, Jonah Bryant, Jasmine Hutton and Noah Meredith in the Sussex squad which won the Inter-County Championship U17 title. He benefited from the wise counsel of renowned coaches Mike Phillips at Chichester and Tim Vail at Lee-on-Solent.
In his teens, motorsport started to compete with squash for Louie’s spare time and affections. Doing work experience at McLaren was “a lightbulb moment” for him and he chose to study motorsport engineering at college.
It was during the first year of his course that the sudden illness struck. A blood test and X-ray led to an urgent trip to A&E for more detailed examinations. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. His treatment was to last two and a half years, a period which included the horrors of the pandemic.
“My mum was like a ghost on the day I got my diagnosis,” says Louie. “She was just numb.”
It was the start of a horrendous period of undergoing two different types of chemotherapy, neither of which were successful. By April of 2020, the Covid lockdowns began which intensified the difficulty and stress of the treatment.
Louie next opted for radiotherapy, which still didn’t get rid of the tumour in his lungs. “The doctors were perplexed,” he remembers. “They kept lying me down and asking if I could breathe, and I said, ‘Yes, I’m breathing fine.’ The Hodgkin lymphoma was quite aggressive and stubborn.”
Louie needed a stem cell transplant but was told the lymphoma needed to be in complete remission before they could attempt the operation. The next attempt to achieve this was through targeted chemotherapy using monoclonal antibody treatment. This didn’t work either. “At this point, it started to feel like we were running out of options,” said Louie.
The next treatment was immunotherapy, which triggers the immune system to respond and attack. This, finally, got him into remission and his stem cell transplant was scheduled for the end of April 2021, as they’d found a suitably matched donor.
With Covid still a threat, Louie and his mum had to remain in a room in Southampton Hospital together for six weeks, as he was immunosuppressed and highly vulnerable to infection. “It was incredibly kind and generous of my mum to stay with me all that time,” he reflects. “She wasn’t even allowed to walk around the hospital due to infection control.”
Rewinding slightly back to those awful first months after his treatment began, Louie did venture on to the squash court for a gentle solo hit up and down the ball. He called it ‘squash ball therapy’.
Another significant moment during an otherwise dreadful period was a job interview with Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, manufacturers of Formula 1 engines, based near Northampton.
This had been arranged before his diagnosis, but Louie decided to go through with it despite being midway through his second type of chemotherapy treatment. He turned up for the interview with a bald head and no eyebrows.
“I was just happy to be out the house, to be honest,” he says. “I felt no pressure. I had bigger fish to fry with my health so it was just a nice day out. But I got a phone call a week later saying they wanted to take me on. I decided to delay it a year because I didn’t feel ready to move away from home yet. It ended up being a further two years before I actually started in the role.”
Returning to the period of his stem cell treatment, Louie says it was “a bit scary” returning home after six weeks of very intense care with his mum sitting alongside him. There were then many, many return visits to the hospital for lymphocite top-ups, biopsies and other follow-up treatments, but these became less regular over the ensuring year’s recovery period.
Eventually, two years after being offered the role, he moved to Northampton and started his dream role as a Level 4 Mercedes engine build apprentice in September 2022. At the time of writing, he has just a few months left.
His next ambition is to become part of the trackside race team and travel the world on the F1 circuit. “Working on the F1 circuit is my dream, while playing competitive squash in-between races, of course!” he laughs.
Yes, Louie has now returned to the squash court, playing for Lings in Northants League Division One and Market Harborough in the top tier of the Leicestershire League (alongside England’s George Parker).
“I’ve been lucky enough to be trained by some great technical coaches, so I was hitting the ball fine when I first went back on court,” says Louie. “It was the fitness I really struggled with. I was so out of puff but there wasn’t a lot I could do, apart from just keep playing squash!”
Last year, the British Transplant Games came on to Louie’s radar. Representing Anthony Nolan, the charity that found his stem cell donor, he entered the 2024 event in Nottingham and won a gold medal in his squash age group and bronze in the badminton doubles.
He was then invited to represent Team GB in the World Transplant Games in Dresden in August 2025. In the final of the 18-29-year-old bracket, he beat Canada’s Andrew Herring in three tight games.
“We both worked so hard and had a great game,” 23-year-old Louie reflected. “It made me realise how much I’d missed the big matches, the big moments, pressure points and having an audience. It was just brilliant to be experiencing that again.”
Louie dedicated his victory to his grandfather, David Lunt (who he affectionately called ‘Puppy’), who passed away in January. “More than what I’ve been through, winning in Dresden actually made me think more about my grandad,” he says.
“He loved watching me play squash and if I did do any reflecting, I thought about how proud he would have been. I thought more about him than I did myself. I miss him dearly and he was a legendary guy.”
Forged by the loss of his grandfather, the unwavering support he received from his mum and the experiences he’s gone through, Louie now has a tenacious and positive outlook on life.
“I want to leave no stone unturned and if there’s something I want to do, I try my damned hardest to achieve it, whether that in my career, squash, motorsport or charity fundraising. I try my best not to look back. I always try to look forward at what’s next.”
