🇮🇳 Anahat Singh

Squash is a game of geometry and lungs. The ball is small, dies quickly off a cold front wall and must be struck with enough control to land within a few centimetres of the side wall, where an opponent cannot swing at it. Rallies are decided less by winners than by the accumulation of pressure: a player who can hold the T — the intersection at the centre of the court — forces her opponent to run corner to corner while she moves two steps. At junior world level the physical gap between players is small. The gap that matters is in shot selection under fatigue, and that is what separates a semi-finalist from a champion.

Anahat Singh was born on 13 March 2008 in Delhi and came to squash through her elder sister. She was winning national age-group titles before she was ten and travelling to the British Junior Open — the sport's unofficial junior world championship — by her early teens, taking the under-17 girls' title there in January 2025. The pattern of her career has been to enter an age category, win it, and move up early rather than collect trophies against smaller opponents. She took Asian junior gold in 2023 and, in 2025, a bronze at the World Juniors that was India's first medal in the event in fifteen years.

The 2026 championships were held at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, with the world's strongest junior field. Anahat arrived as the top seed, which in an event dominated by one nation for a decade and a half is a statement of ranking rather than of expectation. She swept her first three opponents without conceding a single game. Across six matches on the way to the title she dropped two games in total. Squash draws are unforgiving — there is no group stage, no second chance, and a single flat afternoon ends the tournament — so a run that economical is unusual at any level.

In the final she faced Ruqayya Salem, the second seed and the latest product of the Egyptian pipeline. Anahat took the first game 11-3, effectively settling the question of who would be dictating the pattern of play. The second went 11-7. The third, the one where an opponent with nothing left to lose usually finds something, went 11-9. Ending an Egyptian run that stretched back to 2011 in straight games is the part of the result that specialists noticed; the part India noticed was simply the flag next to the winner's name.

Squash occupies an awkward position in Indian sport. It has produced world-class seniors — Saurav Ghosal and Joshna Chinappa among them — without ever converting that into depth, and it lacks the domestic league infrastructure that carries cricket and, increasingly, badminton. Anahat has been explicit that she regards visibility as the constraint. She has spoken repeatedly about wanting the result to reach children who have never held a racket, and about the sport's inclusion in the Olympic programme as the moment its economics in India might finally change.

The junior title is a checkpoint rather than a destination. Junior world champions in squash have a mixed record of converting into senior top-ten players; the transition demands a different physical profile and a tolerance for a professional tour where prize money is thin outside the top twenty. Anahat turned eighteen four months before the final, which means she is now moving permanently into senior competition. What the 2026 result establishes is not that she will become world number one, but that the ceiling on Indian junior squash was never structural — it was just unbroken.