By Mike Dale
Great Britain's hopes of winning an Olympic squash medal have received a blow with the news that Jonah Bryant is to have shoulder surgery and will be ruled out for a further six to nine months.
Bryant will undergo the operation with London shoulder specialist Andrew Wallace on Monday 19 October and the lengthy recovery period will add to the seven months he has already missed since first sustaining the injury at the Optasia Championship in March.
The minimum six-month post-surgery rehabilitation period all but rules the 21-year-old out of next summer's European Games in Istanbul — meaning he will likely miss the first chance to seal qualification for squash's Olympic debut at LA28.
If Bryant does indeed miss the European Games, he will have a second chance to make the Olympics via his PSA world ranking on the cut-off date of 22 May 2028. However, he will face a race against time to get his ranking up to the required level.
The timing of the Brighton-born star's injury could barely have been worse. At the time of the fatal dive during a second round match against Diego Elias at the Wimbledon Club, Bryant had just hit the world top 10 for the first time.
Hailed as the most exciting English player since James Willstrop by his coach Rob Owen, Bryant had beaten several members of the top 10 on the PSA Tour, including most of his rivals for places in the GB Olympic team, Joel Makin, Mohamed ElShorbagy and Curtis Malik.
"Jonah was already the best player in Great Britain," Owen told Squash Player. "He is hopefully still a contender for an Olympic gold medal, but it does make it [qualification] more difficult.
"No-one is questioning the fact he's good enough, it's more about has he now got time to qualify?"
Given the minimum six-month recovery period, Bryant's earliest potential return to action would be April next year. The cut-off date for direct qualification for the European Games is 19 April 2027. If Bryant's world ranking puts him below the top three GB players (and he has already fallen below Joel Makin, Marwan ElShorbagy and Mohamed ElShorbagy), he won't qualify.
It's not surprising that Stuart Crawford, the newly-appointed GB Squash head coach, told us that European Games "seem to be out of the window," for his tyro.
The nightmare scenario for Bryant is that, in his probable absence, the second-ranked GB player (currently Marwan) wins the European Games gold medal. Bryant would then have to get his ranking back up above the top-ranked GB player (currently Makin) by 22 May 2028 in order to have a chance of qualifying for LA — a much more onerous task.
If the top-ranked GB player, (currently Makin), or a player from any other nation (e.g. Victor Crouin), was to win the European Games gold medal, Bryant would 'only' need to be the second highest-ranked GB player by 22 May 2028.
GB would, in that scenario, be one of the two nations who take two players to LA (this presumes the other is Egypt, and also presumes — less confidently — that France's, or any other nation's, second-ranked player won't rise above GB's in that timeframe).
Whilst Bryant's prospects of being a member of GB's first ever Olympic squash team are undoubtedly damaged, he will still have a whole year to rebuild his world ranking, provided firstly he returns on schedule and then remains healthy through to LA.
"I definitely still think it's possible for him to qualify," commented Crawford, who as England coach selected Bryant for his international debut at the European Team Championships in 2025.
"If he can get back before the end of this season, he can give himself a full 12 months to get his ranking back up. Even if he doesn't return until the start of the 2027/28 season, it might still give him enough time. He will have a protected ranking which will allow him to get into the big events.
"The way I'd describe it is his margin for error is reduced. If he comes back and has another setback, or a different injury and has to miss two or three events, that would become quite critical."
Agonisingly for Bryant, he had seemed to be on the verge of a return to action over the summer after lengthy rehab work with specialist physiotherapist Ben Ashworth.
By June, he was back in full training, had entered several PSA tournaments and put his name down for the Roehampton team in the European Club Championships. But as those events approached, he repeatedly pulled out, feeling further pain in the shoulder. It soon became clear surgery was the only option.
His coach Owen calls the setback "pretty tragic" but backed his young charge to "do his rehab obsessively and get himself right."
Bryant moved from his native Sussex several years ago to train full-time at the Rob Owen Academy in Solihull. Their player-coach relationship is extremely close, which gives Owen leeway to gently lambast Bryant for the incident in which he sustained the injury.
"I coached Paul Coll and Joel Makin who dived hundreds of times without a problem, but I'm not a big fan of diving. You never saw Jahangir or Jansher dive on a squash court, did you? You rarely win the point, and clearly it's dangerous.
"It is pretty tragic for Jonah though. It's a weak era in men's squash and he and Mohamed Zakaria have gone through top players like a knife through butter. It's sad not just for Jonah, but for the game of squash. It's good for the sport to have young players like him coming through."
