The Squash Player Who Didn't Lose for Five Years

Jahangir Khan won the 1981 World Open in Toronto at 17 by beating Australia's Geoff Hunt in the final. Hunt had been world No. 1 for most of the decade. Khan, the youngest player ever to take the title, was supposed to be the upset; he turned out to be the next era.

For the next five years he simply did not lose. From November 1981 to 11 November 1986 — five years and four days — Khan walked off every squash court a winner. He took six straight World Opens and ten straight British Opens during the run. Guinness World Records lists the streak at 555 consecutive matches.

The number is the part that gets argued about. In their book Jahangir Khan 555, Rod Gilmour and Alan Thatcher concluded after going through tour archives that nobody was keeping a complete count at the time, and the 555 figure is almost certainly off. Their research suggests the true total is somewhere different, but they couldn't pin it down — which is its own quiet point about how informally professional squash was tracked in the early 80s.

The streak ended in Toulouse, in the final of the 1986 World Open. New Zealand's Ross Norman, who had spent years studying Khan's game, beat him 9–5, 9–7, 7–9, 9–1. Norman later said his strategy was to bore Khan into a mistake. It worked once. Khan went back to winning the World Open the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.