How Long Did It Take For Squash To Become An Olympic Event?

are to find a sport with more prestige and history than squash, and a growing number of courts are being built and revitalised as the sport has seen a resurgence in recent years.

This unusual parabola of popularity has led to the rather unusual fact that Squash has never been an Olympic event, and it will take until 2028 for that injustice to finally be rectified.

Given that the Olympics have played host to sports as unusual as competitive architecture (which was once won by the stadium that the event was hosted in), pigeon shooting and poodle clipping, it is remarkable that squash has never had its moment under the Olympic torch.

It has been a regular fixture in the Commonwealth Games for decades, but has historically struggled to make it into the Olympics.

The most recent concerted effort to change this was in the wake of London 2012, which narrowly missed out on the spot.

Four years later in Rio De Janeiro, squash got even closer, only losing out to Rugby Sevens and Golf, two huge spectator sports that had also inexplicably been rarely competed at in the Olympics.

Leading up to the Tokyo games, it appeared that squash finally had its chance, as a major corruption scandal led to competitive weightlifting being temporarily taken out of the 2020 and 2024 games, although it would later be reinstated, and squash would miss its chance one more time.

In 2028, however, the surge in popularity of the sport in the United States, the versatility of placing a squash court in a variety of different eye-catching venues and the unique combination of novelty and tradition made for a successful bid.

The importance of bringing squash to the single biggest sporting audience in the world every four years cannot possibly be understated, as one notable showcase generally has a cascading effect that boosts the sport as a whole.