Anahat Singh- New sensation

[jayakris]

I don't follow squash much at all, but thought that over the past couple of decades Pakistan had gone away from being much of a factor in squash. I may be wrong. Or maybe not, based on the posts above!

[arjun2761]

Pakistan is a dysfunctional corrupt country. So things like age cheating or other kinds of cheating (condoned by their authorities) should not be a surprise to anyone. Mind you, some of that is also true for India but I think India has better governance systems and institutions even if they are also tainted by corruption.

[Atithee]

Yes, the days of Khans ruling the squash world are long gone. Neither Pakistan nor India appear in top players now. Totally dominated by Egyptians, especially in men.

[prasen9]

In Urdu, hatami means last or the limit. Dead is a manifestation of that. So, limitless could be derived from that too.

The word "anaahat" comes straight from Sanskrit and it has nothing to do with Urdu; unless Urdu has borrowed "hata" from Sanskrit. That is typically not the case with Urdu words, I think.

Urdu is basically Hindi+ a bit of Persian+misc. I say misc because in all Indian languages we have words from Arabic, Turkish, etc. but these are negligible in number. Most Urdu words come from Sanskrit. The language should be called Hindustani with dialects in different areas. But, of course, Pakistanis want a language of their own without whole sale language change, like the artificial revival of Hebrew or something except they did not really have a Hebrew-like language to start with. So, it is Hindustani written in a different script and called a different name. Basically, packaging.

[prasen9]

Pakistan is a dysfunctional corrupt country. So things like age cheating or other kinds of cheating (condoned by their authorities) should not be a surprise to anyone. Mind you, some of that is also true for India but I think India has better governance systems and institutions even if they are also tainted by corruption.

And, this is corroborated when you have waves of junior champions but no senior champion. A junior champion is not always guaranteed to be a great senior but if you have tons of juniors, then you expect one among them to pan out. If none do, then there must have been some age cheating or other type of corruption.

[sameerph]

^^^ I assumed that those like the Egyptians would be tough to overcome for Olympic Golds but maybe a bronze medal or something a couple of Olympics later?

I do not follow squash that closely but at 16 Anahat seems to be the youngest in top 100 of womens rankings. So, there can be some hope.

When I look at top 50, there are only 2 teenagers in it and average age is 26. So, we should not expect anything from Anahat at LA 2028 when she will be around 20, maybe at 2032 olympics we can hope for some miracle. A medal at next Asian games could be possible and if she does that at 18 will be a good indication of progress.

[pancakesdonuts]

Anahat Singh wins 2 top-tier challenger events back to back in India. She continues to rise and moves to #61 in rankings. Early LA prospect for sure.

[sameerph]

Yes, Anahat keeps winning everything that she is playing but is still playing relatively lower level events ( I do not really know the tournament structure in squash) and junior events .

Will she really grow that much in 3 years to be a medal prospect at LA. I think she needs to be at least around in top 15 in world rankings to be called a medal contender.

[pancakesdonuts]

I would like to summarize structure of PSA events. I got to know about PSA system few days ago as i was curious about the relevance of the tournaments wins by Anahat.

PSA tournaments are split into two main circuits: PSA World Events and PSA Challenger Events. And the season cycle is similar to Soccer i.e. August-June.

PSA Challenger Tier: PSA Challenger Events 15 — $15,000
PSA Challenger Events 12 — $12k
PSA Challenger Events 9 — $9k
PSA Challenger Events 6 — $6k
PSA Challenger Events 3 — $3k

PSA World Events Tier: Diamond — $300k
Platinum — $190k
Gold — $100k
Silver — $75k
Bronze — $50k
Copper — $25k

Then at the end of season there is World Championship followed by Tour Finals.

Now let's dissect Anahat's performance over the past 2 seasons. In 2023-24 she won 4 challenger events. 3 of them were Challenger 3 (lowest level) and the remaining was Challenger 6. In 2024-25 season, she has already won 8 events. In the start of the season she won 5 titles (3 Challenger lvl. 3 and 2 Challenger lvl. 6). In December she made a progress winning mid level Challenger 9 title. But the real breakthrough happened in the last two weeks when she won the highest level challenger 15 events back to back which pushed her rank from #82 to #61. She is climbing the ladder consistently and has beaten some opponents ranked between 60-100 easily. Now, she has the ranking to enter lower tier tour events (copper, bronze & silver) and she is not defending any big points till the end of the year. I predict her ranking will be between 25 to 40 by the end of the year.

yeah i agree it might be bit far fetched right now to call her a medal prospect. But i do feel optimistic about her. She has successfully climbed the challenger tier and is on huge winning streak. Btw she will play World Championship Qual. Asia in April and seems favorite to qualify for WC which will happen in May. Let's see how she does.

[sameerph]

Thanks for that detailed post about squash tournament structure and about Anahat level.

Here is another article from ESPN-

Teenager Anahat Singh leads Indian squash's hope for Olympic glory

JSW Sports, who has partnered with the Squash Rackets Federation of India, openly tout her as an LA Games medal prospect. She has a full team around her now with former pros Gregory Gaultier - who Ghosal says is one of the best coaches in the world - and Stephane Galifi as full-time coaches.