Nicol eyeing a high five

Nicol David almost certainly will never play in an Olympics. She is 31, and after years of polite lobbying and genuine hope, squash, the demanding sport she has long dominated, has yet to make the final cut into the Games.

Not for 2012. Not for 2016 and not, after a particularly concerted effort, for 2020.“It was difficult,” she said of the most recent effort to make squash an Olympic sport. “That was one of our best campaigns.”

So David, a small Malaysian who casts a long shadow with a racket in hand, must settle for the peaks she is allowed to scale.

She won her second gold medal in singles at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July and is now in prime position to win a fifth gold medal at the 17th Asian Games, in Incheon.

“For our country, the Asian Games is probably the next big thing after the Olympics,” David said in an interview this week from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital.  The Asian Games are also the event that launched her career in earnest. She was just 14 when she won the singles in the 1998 Games in Bangkok, and that precocious performance helped convince her that a successful professional career was possible. It also helped convince Malaysian sports officials to throw more backing behind a sport whose traditional power base was elsewhere.

But David, the youngest of three squash-playing sisters, has changed that equation and is now that rare athlete from Southeast Asia who is No 1 in a sport played globally. She is also the first Asian woman to reach the top of the squash rankings.

“She’s been up there for a long time,” said the British player Laura Massaro, 30, who has competed against her since juniors and is currently her most serious rival. “Many people think a lot of it comes down to her physical presence on court and what she has in terms of physical gifts. She is extremely quick. But I believe that a lot of people are handed a lot of gifts. It’s how you build on them. More than anything with Nicol I think it comes down to will and a determination to succeed and the drive to keep going every day.”

David was born and raised on the island of Penang, part of a multicultural family in a multicultural country.

“My dad is a mix of Indian and Eurasian, my mom is Chinese, so I’m a little bit of everything,” said David, who grew up speaking English at home.

Her father represented the state of Penang in hockey and athletics and played goalkeeper for a local soccer team. If not for a family friend’s decision to build a squash center in Penang, his daughters surely would have focused on a sport other than squash. “My dad played socially, and they asked him to bring my sisters and me over to the courts, and that’s how we started to play and get some coaching,” David said.

 “I did running and swimming and played volleyball and basketball in school, but what really got me into squash was that it brought me to places, and I got to travel with my sisters. We had a good bunch who really looked out for each other, and we were just having a ball, meeting new people and playing the game. We were good at it, too, so I think that was the difference.”

What really made the difference in her professional career was David’s decision in 2003 to move her training base from Malaysia to Amsterdam to work with the coach Liz Irving. Irving, an Australian who reached No 2 in the world rankings, was still playing at the time. David was then 19 and had just taken a three-month break from the sport, having fallen into a funk after missing out on gold at the Asian Games in Busan, South Korea, in 2002.“The move to Amsterdam  really got me to go back a step and break everything down from scratch to start from pretty much zero to build my technique and my movement and how to volley well,” David recalled. “Because in the seniors it was a whole different ball game as opposed to being in the juniors. So that was my turning point to be where I am right now.”

“I think no matter what level you are at in any sport, you have to move out of your country to be in another place and to adapt to the environment and do it on your own,” she said. “Because when you compete, you are out there on your own, usually in a foreign country.”

Squash rallies are extended, grueling affairs, full of lunges and changes in pace, geometry and strategy. But David, despite the physical demands, seldom looks manic or flustered with the ball in motion and her opponent at very close range.

“Nicol is just a different athlete when it comes to moving on the floor,” said Jay Prince, executive editor of US Squash and the founder and publisher of Squash Magazine. “She can scramble when she needs to and can get in situations where she has to run a lot, but she has an ability to settle the point down again, like a tennis player who uses a lob to get out of trouble. She just has this ability to regain her composure in the middle of a rally. She clearly has the foot speed but also the smarts and the variety of shots.”

She has settled down her season quite nicely after her surprise defeat in March in the semifinals of the World Championships, a title she has won seven times but could not manage to win in Penang, her home city. Massaro took the trophy instead, but David beat her in the final of the British Open in May and then in decisive fashion in the final of the Commonwealth Games to cap a tournament in which squash created plenty of buzz and enthusiasm, and even respectable BBC television ratings.

“I hope that got the IOC.'s attention,” David said. “Even though I won’t be able to play in it, I still want to see a squash player on that podium representing their country and getting an Olympic medal someday.”