Nicol David

Nicol Ann David is a Malaysian former professional squash player widely regarded as one of the strongest women ever to play the sport. She won the Women's World Squash Championship eight times between 2005 and 2014 and held the women's world number one ranking for 109 consecutive months, from August 2006 to September 2015, a run unmatched in the modern era of the women's tour.

Born in 1983 in Penang, she came from a sporting family and began playing squash as a young child. By the late 1990s she was already competing on the junior international circuit, winning the World Junior Championship in 1999 and again in 2001, the first player to retain that title.

On the senior tour she combined relentless retrieval with measured length, a style that produced steady results across hard courts in Europe, North America, and Asia. Beyond the World Championship, she also took the British Open five times and won multiple Asian Games gold medals representing Malaysia.

She retired from the professional tour in 2019 and was named the Women's Sport Foundation Sportswoman of the Year, the first squash player and the first Asian woman to receive that honour. After retirement she founded a youth foundation aimed at using sport to support underserved children in Malaysia and continued to advocate for squash inclusion in the Olympic programme.

The given name Nicol is a Scottish form ultimately related to Nicholas, from the Greek Nikolaos, combining nike, meaning victory, with laos, meaning people. Its use as a feminine name is most common in English-speaking communities of South-East Asia, and her career has made it the best-known instance of the spelling in Malaysian sport.