Liechtenstein’s Award-Winning National Hero David Maier
World no.173 David Maier has an Olympic dream — and not even two heart operations and living in one of the world’s smallest countries is going to stop him believing.
The 24-year-old is from Liechtenstein, an Alpine nation of just over 40,000 people nestled between Austria and Switzerland. It is one of only two doubly-landlocked countries in the world.
Liechtenstein has only one squash club, the five-court Squash Rackets Club Vaduz, founded in 1984 and run by David’s parents. It also functions as the headquarters for the Liechtenstein national squash federation.
It’s fair to say Squash Rackets Club Vaduz punches above its weight. With no domestic competitive structure, the team plays in the Swiss A League and has won it twice. It is regarded as one of Liechtenstein’s finest sporting institutions.
Last year, with England’s Simon Herbert and Austrian legend Aqeel Rehman recruited in their line-up, SRC Vaduz came third in the European Club Championships at Roehampton Club in London. For this achievement, they were named ‘Team of the Year‘ by the Liechtenstein Olympic Committee at a special ceremony.
At the time of writing, the SRC Vaduz team about to make the short trip to Graz, Austria, for this year’s European Club campaign, where Jonah Bryant, Declan James, Jasmine Hutton and Satomi Watanabe will be amongst the opposition.
David Maier is by some distance Liechtenstein’s best ever player. In a country as small as Liechtenstein, he is something of a national hero. “When I go out for a drink or a meal, people know me from the newspaper and that’s quite cool,” he tells Squash Player.
“They ask me, ‘Are you that squash player?’ It’s a little bit of fame! People in Liechtenstein are very polite, so it’s not a problem. They are very proud and care a lot for their sportsmen.”
A former European no.1 at U13 level, David’s profile has risen even more since he was nominated for Sportsman of the Year in the Liechtenstein Olympic Committee awards twice in the last two years, finishing second and third.
Last year’s nomination owed much to his successful recovery from two heart operations that he feared may have ended his squash career at the age of only 22.
Playing Dutchman Sebastiaan Hofman in the quarter-finals of the 2023 Schräglage Open in Stuttgart, Maier’s heart began racing uncontrollably during the fourth game.
He had inherited a slow heart rate from his father’s side of the family, but after one long, intense rally, his rate went far, far above his normal levels. “It shot off the charts,” he says. “I was completely knocked out. I was really scared. I didn’t know what happened.
“The referee told me I had to play on as I wasn’t injured, but I said, ‘I can’t! It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do!’ I had nothing in the tank. My reactions were like I was drunk!”
Thereafter (probaby unwisely), he played in the Swiss Open, then the Liechtenstein Open at his hometown club, but during a Swiss League match, his heart rate soared again.
After many rounds of tests, specialist doctors in St Gallen, Switzerland, diagnosed an atrial fibrillation which necessitated an operation on an artery. Access to his heart had to come up through an incision made next to his hip, but the first attempt didn’t work because they couldn’t access the right side of his heart.
“When I woke up after five hours, the doctor told me it didn’t work, but he now knew where the problem was and said I needed another operation,” says David. “I didn’t want to do it, but I realised if I want to carry on playing squash, I will have to get it done.”
The second attempt was successful, but left David completely wiped out. “My condition to play was zero,” he remembers. “I got one level up the stairs and I was done! I had to completely start from the beginning.”
With the help of Micha Eder at the Rotor Athlete elite sport rehab campus, David regained full fitness, but admits the heart scare had sowed seeds of doubts the viability of his squash career.
“It was no joke; it was heavy,” he reflects. “It was quite a dangerous situation. My head was thinking a lot of things!
“Of course I worried that I would never play squash again. In my head, I was thinking, ‘What if the operation doesn’t work? What if it goes wrong?’ When the first operation didn’t work and I was lying in bed in the hospital, obviously that was bad. Of course, I tried to be positive, but without your heart you can’t live.”
He had six months off the Tour to recover before returning at the Mozart Open in Austria in June 2024. Since then, his world ranking has risen from 370 to 173 – 50 places higher than the time of the awful incident in Stuttgart.
David is coached by his father Patrick, trains alongside his brother Peter in Vaduz and crosses the border to train regularly with members of the Swiss team. He travels monthly to Wurzburg, Germany, for sessions with the legendary ‘Tree Chopper’ Simon Rosner.
Now, aged 24, his focus is the same as most other professional squash players. “For me it’s clear — I want to go to the Olympics,” he states.
“That’s my target. It was my dream as a kid. First it was to win the World Championships, and now there’s something new. How many people can say, ‘I was an Olympian?’ In squash, just 32 people can say they were there competing. I want to be one of them.”
