Ask Canada’s top squash player Hollie Naughton where she lives — a seemingly simple question — and there’s a pause and a chuckle.
“That is a great question — I just had this conversation with the border (agent),” Naughton said last week during a quick trip home to play in a tournament before returning to her training base in Pontefract, U.K.
“Technically, I live here,” she said of her parents home in Mississauga. “I pay taxes here, I call here home, but I’m in England now the majority of the time just because of training.”
Naughton, 28, has been playing on the professional squash world tour since she graduated from high school at 17. She’s the only Canadian to win two squash medals at a Pan Am Games and the only female player to ever win a medal at the Commonwealth Games. She’s Canada’s top ranked player, currently 19th in the world.
“For me to be able to compete and feel ready for all of that, being here (in Canada) is not the most ideal place, unfortunately. Maybe one day.”
Her dream of a future where her sport is better known, gets broadcast on TV and has more opportunities for high performance training, sport funding and sponsorship dollars is one that’s widely shared in the squash community. The World Squash Federation is trying — yet again — to achieve some of that by getting the sport into the Olympic spotlight.
Squash is one of nine sports vying for inclusion in the 2028 LA Olympics, alongside cricket, flag football, men’s baseball/women’s softball, lacrosse, breaking, karate, kickboxing and motorsport.
The Los Angeles organizing committee was expected to propose its picks to the IOC executive board earlier this month but that meeting was abruptly cancelled after news reports that L.A. would put forward cricket — which International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has suggested he’d like to see in the Games — if it could also get flag football included.
A new meeting has not been publicly announced yet but any new sports put forward will need executive approval and to be ratified at the next IOC Session, Oct. 15-17, in Mumbai.
But adding something new may also mean taking away from sports that are already there.
The IOC has given cities the ability to add new sports that appeal to their market and ticks off its boxes around youth appeal, global popularity, gender equality and environmental sustainability. At the same time, it has capped the total number of athletes at 10,500 to keep the cost and complexity of hosting a Summer Games from spiralling even further.
If the IOC sticks with that cap, adding new sports for L.A. means subtracting athletes from existing sports, which becomes “such a zero sum game,” says Michele Donnelly, a sport management professor at Brock University and researcher on gender and the Olympic movement.
“This delay in announcing is another interesting snapshot of how challenging that is,” she said.
“We see the team sports really trying to figure that out, like how to make different versions of their sport so that the IOC might accept them because it’s not so many athletes,” she said. “But it’s such a challenge to all of the values of Olympism around, you know, participation and the idea that the Games are the inspiration for participation. Well, if there really aren’t any spots to participate in then it doesn’t have that outcome.”
For L.A., World Lacrosse has pitched its recently-introduced six-on-six version (rather than 10 players aside in the traditional field game) that also features shorter games, a smaller field and faster tempo. Flag football is played with just five players aside in 20-minute halves and can be held in a range of venues — from stadiums to urban sports parks — making it a flexible low-cost contender. The International Cricket Council proposed the T20 version of its game for LA — the shortest international format, which takes about three hours to play.
“There do seem to be these situations of international federations tying themselves in knots a little bit to try and get onto the Olympic program,” Donnelly said.
As Jamie Nicholls, chief executive of Squash Canada, puts it: “We’ve changed almost everything … and still we weren’t able to get in.”
“L.A. is looking somewhat promising,” he said of squash making the shortlist again. “We’re all very hopeful, but we’re always hopeful.”
After past failed bids, squash moved to glass courts, shorter games, improved officiating and balls that TV cameras can pick up at speeds exceeding 200 km/h to make it more broadcast-friendly.
Temporary glass squash courts can be put up anywhere, making it a low cost event, and its player base is diverse across 150 countries. It also has a merged men’s and women’s professional tour and equal prize money at top events.
Squash looked set to be included in the 2012 London Games until an upheaval over wrestling being left off and then brought back in and, most recently, it was passed over in favour of the youthful action sports climbing, skateboarding, surfing and break dancing.
“For the community it’s been pretty heartbreaking, to be honest, over the last 20 years,” Nicholls said.
Squash has been part of the Pan Am Games since 1995 and the Commonwealth Games since 1998. Making a national team for those multi-sport games is “the pinnacle of an athletes’s career,” but it doesn’t come with the same lift for athletes or the sport as the Olympics.
Being included in the Olympics elevates a sport’s profile and visibility and increases national sport funding for federations and individual athletes, through programs like Own the Podium, as well as opening the door to much wider sponsorship potential.
“The Olympics is the funding bump so we’re on the outside looking in,” Nicholls said. “The Olympic movement is just so much bigger.”
At last summer’s Commonwealth Games, where Naughton won a silver medal and carried Canada’s flag in the closing ceremonies, she was star struck by some of the athletes from other sports she saw walking around the village.
“For someone like me who plays squash, you know, no one really knows about squash players, and you walk around the village and see all these other athletes that you see on TV — it’s very cool,” Naughton said.
Getting squash on TV, which she believes is key to drawing more people and sponsors to the sport, is the “best scenario” that could come from Olympic inclusion.
“Any sport that’s in the Olympics has a bit more of a pull,” she said. “Everyone wants to go to the Olympics.”