Squash at LA28: The Sport Got In Because Its Court Can Be Built Anywhere

The bid that finally worked was architectural

Squash campaigned for Olympic inclusion for decades and was rejected repeatedly — for 2012, 2016 and 2020 — while other sports came in.

The objections were always the same. It is hard to televise. It is hard to follow if you do not play it. And it needs a specialist venue that a host city has no use for afterwards.

The last of those has been answered completely, and the answer is the glass court.

A modern show court is a portable structure, four transparent walls assembled on any flat surface, with the audience seated all the way round. Squash has erected them at the base of the Pyramids of Giza and inside Grand Central Terminal.

Which means an Olympic host does not build a squash venue. It puts one somewhere it already owns.

For LA28 that somewhere is the Universal Studios backlot, in front of the Back to the Future courthouse. A film set, hosting an Olympic sport, with no permanent construction and nothing to decommission.

Why that matters more than it sounds

The single largest problem in Olympic hosting is venues nobody needs afterwards. Every Games leaves behind facilities built for one fortnight of a minority sport, and the political cost of that has made cities reluctant to bid at all.

The IOC’s response has been to prioritise sports that fit existing infrastructure. See how a sport becomes Olympic — the criteria weigh cost, venue requirements and athlete quota heavily, and a sport that arrives with its own building solves the hardest part of the assessment.

It is the same logic that admitted 3x3 basketball, which plays on a half court in a car park, and Olympic flag football, which needs half a football pitch.

Squash did not get in by becoming more popular. It got in by becoming cheap to stage — and by the IOC changing what it was optimising for.

Sixteen and sixteen

16 men and 16 women, singles only, over ten days beginning the day after the opening ceremony.

That is a small field, and it is the other half of the bargain. New sports enter within a fixed athlete quota, so a sport that wants in offers the smallest viable competition.

Sixteen is a clean bracket — four rounds, no byes, no group stage. It also means the entry standard is brutal: the world’s 17th-best player, who would win almost any national championship on earth, does not go.

And singles only. No doubles, no mixed, despite squash doubles existing and being a genuine discipline. One event per gender is the entry price.

The scoring is the modern version, and that is deliberate

Games to 11, best of five, two-point margin, so 10-10 continues until someone leads by two.

Squash used to be scored to 9 with hand-in hand-out — only the server could score a point, as in old volleyball or badminton before its own reform.

That system produced matches of unpredictable and sometimes enormous length, because long periods could pass with the score unchanged. Professional matches ran past two hours routinely.

Moving to point-a-rally to 11 did two things. It made match duration roughly predictable, which is what a broadcaster and an Olympic timetable require. And it made every rally consequential, which is what a viewer who does not play the sport needs in order to follow it.

The two-point margin at 10-10 preserves the one thing worth keeping from the old system: a game cannot be won by a single lucky point at the end.

Squash reformed its scoring long before it had an Olympic place. Doing so is part of why it eventually got one — the same sequence padel is following now with the Star Point.

The refereeing problem is still there

One thing the glass court has not solved: squash is a sport where two players occupy the same space, and the central judgement — did the striker have a fair view and a fair swing? — is unavoidably interpretive.

Lets and strokes are the hardest thing about watching squash for a newcomer, because the rally stops and something is awarded for a reason that is not visible.

Professional squash has added video review and a three-referee system to make those decisions more consistent. They remain the sport’s weak point in front of a general audience, and an Olympic tournament is the largest general audience squash has ever had.

That is the real test in 2028. The venue question is settled. Whether a viewer who has never played can follow a match — the objection that kept squash out for twenty years — is about to be answered in front of the biggest possible crowd.

For the sport itself, see squash’s let and stroke rules.