Nicol David

Nicol David: Nine Years at the Top of the World

In September 2015, the women's squash world rankings changed at the top for the first time in one hundred and eight consecutive months. Nicol David of Penang had held the number one position without a single interruption since January 2006 — nine years, through four World Open title defences, an undefeated season and a fifty-six match winning streak — and it took Egypt's Raneem El Weleily to end it. David later admitted the scale of what she had done only registered once it was over. "I never fully understood it until I was not there anymore," she said.

A Penang Household of Squash Players

Nicol Ann David was born on 26 August 1983 in Penang, into a family that produced squash players the way other families produce doctors. Her mother, Ann Marie David, was a Malaysian Chinese schoolteacher of Hokkien-Hakka descent; her father, Desmond, a Malaysian Indian engineer from a Tamil background. Both her sisters, Lianne and Cheryl, played the game seriously. She picked up a racket at five.

She was also, by any measure, a serious student. At the Convent Green Lane schools in Penang she took seven A grades in her PMR examinations and seven again in her SPM — a fact worth holding onto, because the choice she then made was to leave that path for a sport that had no Olympic status, limited prize money and almost no Malaysian precedent at world level.

The Youngest World Junior Champion

The junior record announced her early. In 1999, at fifteen, David became the youngest woman ever to win the World Junior Championship. She won it again in 2001, one of very few players to take the title twice. She turned professional in 2000 and won her first WISPA tour title within a month of doing so.

The transition to the senior game was not instant, which is part of the story. It took until 2005 for her to win the World Open for the first time — and once she had, the sport more or less belonged to her for the next decade.

Eight World Titles

David won the World Open eight times: 2005 and 2006, then five in a row from 2008 to 2012, then again in 2014. No player, male or female, had won it eight times before. She added five British Open titles, ten Hong Kong Opens and nine Asian individual championships. Her career finished with eighty-one professional tour titles from a hundred and two finals, and 567 wins from 680 matches.

The single most extraordinary stretch came in 2008, when she went the entire season undefeated, won ten titles and put together a fifty-six match winning run that lasted seventeen months. In January 2006 she had become the first Malaysian and the first Asian woman ever to be ranked world number one; she then stayed inside the world's top five for an unbroken 143 months.

At multi-sport level she was equally relentless: five Asian Games gold medals, two Commonwealth Games golds and three World Games golds. In 2021 the World Games named her its Greatest Athlete of All Time in a global public vote — an award that measured devotion as much as achievement, but which no other squash player has come close to winning.

Why Nicol Is Called a Genius

Squash rewards a very particular kind of intelligence and it is worth being precise about David's, because the word "genius" applied to an athlete is usually lazy. Hers was not a game of overwhelming power or of the spectacular winner. It was a game of attrition built on movement and geometry: get to the ball early enough that every shot is played from balance, return the ball to the same handful of unattackable places — the back corners, the nick, tight to the side wall — and make the opponent, over the course of an hour, solve an unsolvable problem again and again until they crack. That is a physical achievement first. It rests on court coverage, on recovery to the T after every shot, and on a conditioning base that let her play the same way in the ninetieth minute as in the first.

What separates it from mere fitness is the reading. A squash player must decide, in a fraction of a second, where an opponent is, where they are about to be, and which of five available shots leaves them worst placed — while both players occupy the same small box and the ball can travel to any of four walls. David's edge was consistency of that judgement under fatigue: the shot selection that stays correct when the legs are gone. Her own explanation of the nine-year reign is not tactical but psychological — she described her mind and body as having "battled it out to stay at the very top of my game for such a long time" — and the durability of her decision-making is what the record actually measures.

The honest counter-case: this is not intellect in the sense the word usually carries, and David has never claimed otherwise. It is trained perception and extreme self-discipline in a sport with a small elite player pool, and the Egyptian generation that eventually displaced her had a more inventive attacking game than hers. What deserves the word is not brilliance in any single rally. It is that she found a way to be right more often than anyone else, for a hundred and eight months in a row, which is a far rarer thing than a spectacular shot.

Beyond the Court

David retired in February 2019, finishing at the end of the 2018/19 PSA season at thirty-five. PSA chief executive Alex Gough called her "undoubtedly one of the greatest squash players of all time." She had already been inducted into the World Squash Federation Hall of Fame in 2011 — while still at the peak of her career — and entered the PSA Hall of Fame in 2024.

Her post-playing work has run along three lines she set out at her retirement: promoting the game globally with the PSA, supporting young Malaysians through the Nicol David Foundation, and speaking and writing under the title "Nurturing Belief." The last of those matters most to her. Having spent a career being told that the sport she dominated was invisible, she has spent her retirement making the case that a Malaysian child with a racket has somewhere to go.

Legacy

Malaysia had never produced a world number one in an individual global sport before Nicol David, and Asia had never produced one in women's squash. Made a Datuk at home and elected to the Laureus World Sports Academy abroad, she turned a minority sport into a national fixation for a decade. The most useful thing about her record is what it refuses to romanticise: eight world titles and nine years at the summit were built on getting to the ball early, hitting it to the right place, and doing it again the next day for two decades.