Words: Connor Sheen
There is a particular cruelty reserved for elite sport: not defeat, but proximity.
Losing is one thing. Losing from 9–3 up in the deciding game, within touching distance of the biggest win of your career, is something else entirely.
For Olivia Weaver, that moment came under the vaulted ceiling of Grand Central Terminal mid January. Facing the world No.1 Hania El Hammamy in the Tournament of Champions final, Weaver had the match exactly where she wanted it.
One more push and the narrative would have written itself: first win over a world No.1, first major title, and on home soil.
Instead, the script was torn up.
Eight points disappeared in quick succession. El Hammamy surged. Weaver stalled. And the match, as these things often do at the very highest level, slipped not with a bang, but with an inevitability that only reveals itself in hindsight.
“Of course I could kick myself about the ToC final but I also need to realise that I’m playing the World No.1,” Weaver says.
There is, in that sentence, a quiet recalibration.
Because what Weaver is really describing is not just a match, but a process - the slow, often painful education required to join the sport’s inner circle. El Hammamy, like her great Egyptian contemporaries, has built a career on surviving precisely these moments.
“You have to think about how many battles Hania has had… where she’s lost gut-wrenching matches in five and has been in my shoes,” Weaver continues.
“So I know that she's been on the receiving end of matches like that and that was just my second Platinum final. So I need to just acknowledge that and the fact that I don't have as much experience in those big matches.”
That, perhaps, is the unspoken hierarchy of elite squash. Before you win the biggest matches, you tend to lose them first.
Weaver is still relatively new to this particular stage. This was only her second Platinum final. The margins, as ever, are unforgiving. And yet, there is something revealing in the way she frames the experience.
“I have to use it as fuel.”
The phrase is familiar, almost cliché. But in Weaver’s case, it carries a little more substance. Not because the loss was dramatic, though it was, but because of how she chooses to interpret it.
“You could probably do a study on the most successful athletes across all sports,” she says. “It’s all about mindset and how they’re looking at things and the narrative that they’re creating in their head.
“You obviously have to have a word with yourself and be hard on yourself and demand a lot internally, but it's also just constantly framing it in a positive way, and I know that I'm doing everything in my power to get better every day.”
It is a modern athlete’s language: self-awareness, reframing, narrative control. The understanding that performance is not just physical, but psychological - that the story you tell yourself can shape the outcome as much as the shot you play.
Of course, that does not erase the reality of what happened.
Weaver had the match. And then she didn’t.
“Obviously I wish I could have just gotten over the finish line,” she admits. “It’s easy to look back and say I wish I’d gone for a nick at a certain point… but hindsight is 20-20.
“You just have to take it on the chin and I think that’s the best part about sports. You can experience the highest of highs, if I had won that match it probably would have been like the greatest day of my career but instead it was a crushing loss.
“But at the end of the day, the fact that I'm putting myself in the position to feel those feelings and be a part of a match like that like that's what I think we're all playing this game for.”
For Weaver this was new territory.
For six years, the sport’s biggest titles have been shared among a familiar triumvirate: El Hammamy, Nouran Gohar, Nour El Sherbini. Breaking into that circle requires more than talent. It requires endurance - the ability to absorb these losses without being defined by them.
Weaver came close.
Closer, perhaps, than anyone outside that group has managed in recent memory.
“I was really proud of how I competed throughout the match,” she says. “I felt like the level was very high throughout… I feel like I had the upper hand for a lot of that match.”
"I hate losing and it was obviously a tough one to stomach but I know that it's just going to make me stronger and again.
“I’m definitely walking away from that match more motivated than ever and with more belief than ever.”
And this is where the story shifts.
Because while the result reinforces the existing order, the performance hints at something else: a narrowing of the gap. Belief is an easy word to use and a difficult one to sustain. It is tested most severely not in victory, but in moments like this - when the evidence suggests both possibility and limitation in equal measure.
Weaver’s challenge now is to decide which of those she carries forward.
“I know that because I lost that match, there where will probably be matches that go to five or leads that I will convert or maybe matches where I'll be down and I'll come back because of that match,” she says.
That is the theory.
The practice will come later - in another fifth game, in another moment where the match hangs in the balance and the past lingers just beneath the surface.
