Having lost 16 successive matches to American rival Jimmy Connors, he announced after ending the run with victory at the 1980 Masters tournament: "Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row."

Before squash earned the nod from Los Angeles 2028 to become one of five new sports at the Games, something which was confirmed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) a week later at its Session in Mumbai, it had knocked on the Olympics door on four successive occasions without success.

"That Gerulaitis statement was actually spinning round my head quite a bit," said Gough, whose efforts to widen and innovate the presentation of the sport in recent years have been hugely influential in its eventual Olympic arrival.

Between them, the PSA, the World Squash Federation (WSF) and US Squash pulled together all the elements required to persuade Los Angeles 2028 to give the sport a break it had earned in almost 20 years of effort to earn an Olympic place.

Gough, winner of the World Championship singles bronze for Wales in 1997 and Commonwealth Games doubles bronze a year later, was still playing when the initial, unsuccessful attempt was made to get squash into London 2012

But he was involved in the next three attempts involving Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 were concerned. All unsuccessful also - but, as he recalls, some were more unsuccessful than others…

"When we got into the bidding process for Rio 2016, which was in 2009, it was the first time I was involved with the PSA," Gough said. "It felt that time round that, whilst everyone wanted to do it, it was very last minute, you know, 'We’ve got to get this together, we’ve got to get that together.'

"It was a sport-wide ambition, and the first time the PSA and WSF got together properly, whereas the bid for London 2012 was pretty much just World Squash. But the 2016 effort wasn’t necessarily very well pulled together.

"When we were trying for Tokyo 2020 - that was when we started working with Mike Lee’s Vero Communications. It was driven by the WSF with us alongside, there in all the meetings with Mike, God bless him, and it was a lot more joined up.

"But what happened then was they took weightlifting out and put it back in, and that was almost the end of that process. And then World Squash took the decision at that point, in 2013, to just not carry working with Mike, which was actually something we at the PSA disagreed with.

"So then the decision went forward another couple of years - it went from seven years out to five years out, so there was almost like a second opportunity of getting into Tokyo, and at that point World Squash decided to go it alone.

"And that bit wasn’t great, to be honest.

"But we have kissed and made up after that, and since then it has been very collaborative.

“For the Paris 2024 we had Jacques Fontaine as WSF President and we were working with Webber Shandwick. Again, we were unsuccessful, but that did feel like a like a very well organised thing, and the reason it was important was that by the time we came round to LA2028 we were all ready and together.

"And it was then natural to include US Squash with it being in the US. So it has felt very joined up, which I hope has come through.”

The obvious question at this point consisted of two words: "Why now?"

Gough took a breath, then set off.

"We have been knocking on the door for such a long time and there have been various times when we thought we had made a very good case," he said. "But it’s just not been the right timing, or it’s been a bit unlucky.

"When you go back to Rio 2016, the two sports voted in - golf and rugby sevens - were obviously so much bigger. We made a very good pitch and we ended up just behind those two. They had a lot more reach, but I think we did ourselves proud in that one.

"And then when we tried for the Tokyo 2020 Games we had the situation where weightlifting was taken out. Then it was put back in. And then the decision time was changed from seven years beforehand to five years and the IOC wanted to put in things like surfing and skateboarding and things seemed a lot more directly focused on new things and trying to attract a new audience.

"I think the main issue for squash during that period of time was probably that we were much more comparable to tennis, and table tennis, and badminton rather than surfing and skateboarding, so we were almost in the wrong race at that point.

"And then the attempt to make the Paris 2024 Games was probably an anomaly. It felt like we had done a decent job again, we had jumped through all the hoops we were supposed to but then not really an awful lot changed from how it had been with Tokyo.

"Breaking was coming in and it seemed like a bit of an experiment really from the IOC to try and bring in a totally different audience.

"Is squash really competing there? It felt like the wrong race again."

But for Los Angeles 2028, the vibes were different, Gough claimed.

"This time we have been getting encouraging messages in the US because of the way squash is growing over there," he said. "Their women’s team were second in the World Championships last year and there has been a real rise of the sport there in the last five or six years.

"And I think the pitch that we made to LA2028 really resonated with them in terms of them wanting to try something with squash. The athlete numbers were a factor. Obviously we had to put in something where the athletes weren’t taking up too much place - 64 athletes, split equally according to gender.

"We are an easy and an efficient sport to put on. I’m not quite sure what LA 2028’s thinking is on this and I hope we will be having conversations quite soon, but there are some fantastic theatres over there, ready-made cool, iconic places and you could easily put a squash court in there as we have in other buildings on numerous occasions and have a really cool show that will look very different to any other sport.

"Tennis and badminton don’t work quite as well as squash does in that context.

"When you look at the list of sports that got in it’s a bit more in a traditional mode, a truly global sport.

"All those things, and the timing worked for us this time. We’d gone back to competing with just kind of, I guess, genuine sports again. And I don’t know if whether the fact that we had been knocking on the door for so long had finally tipped the balance."

One other factor in the sport’s favour was the annexation as a sponsor of one of world sport’s great backers in Mark Walter, the US billionaire investor whose interests include Major League Baseball franchise the Los Angeles Dodgers, which he part owns, women’s NBA side the Los Angeles Sparks, and Chelsea Football in the Premier League, of which he is co-owner with Todd Boehly.

Walter began sponsoring the Chicago event in squash, enabling the sport to offer a Million Dollar World Championship, and in May this year Gough was able to announce a "major" new deal offering higher player compensation, more tournaments and better media coverage, following Walter’s decision to acquire a stake in the PSA’s commercial arm, Squash Media & Marketing.

The move was described at the time by Gough as "a game-changer for professional squash." Has the fruit of that assessment just been witnessed?

"When you have got someone of that sort of calibre saying, 'I am backing squash'," Gough responds, "it is definitely making people go, 'Oh wow, well if he is saying that.' It definitely is raising the profile of the sport from that aspect.

"There is still lots of work to be done, but that backing has definitely had an effect on the way that external people would look at squash - so that is a big factor.

"And there will be obviously be plenty of contact in that area. They will be having the baseball/softball at the Dodgers Stadium.

"But from our point of view it wasn’t necessarily a case of getting Mark to dive into his address book and lobby as such. I think it was more just that the news was out there and that was enough really, we didn’t want to embroil Mark in anything."

So is Walter a lifelong squash player? "That’s the funny thing," Gough says. "He actually isn’t. He only came to squash in the last seven or eight year. 

"He was invited to the Chicago event in I think it was 2015, by one of the committee members we have over there.

"And he was instantly blown away by the athletes - that was the main thing that grabbed him. And he quite quickly got to know the level of prize money and where we were at within the sport, and he just wanted to help and drive the numbers up.

"He just thought that the players deserved so much more because the level of athleticism, of competition, just really grabbed him."

Walter has described squash as a "global, highly diverse and exciting sport with a tremendous growth opportunity".

Gough is quick to assent to the idea that the Olympic entrée will be a catalyst to the further spread of the game. "Massively so," he said. 

"The ones who haven’t had much to invest in development will be able to tap into the support that will be on its way now. If that happens to 20 federations at the same time it will hopefully get more playing the sport overnight."

For Gough, given his experiences in this field, the most recent process of seeking Olympic acceptance felt like something of a roller coaster emotionally.

"The process with LA 2028 felt like the most transparent and just the best process we had been through," he said. "Even if we hadn’t have got in we would have felt like we had been given a really good, fair crack at it.

"Their approach of saying to all the sports, 'We don’t want lots of things out in the press, we don’t want all the sports spending millions of dollars or whatever they can afford to influence anything.' It felt like they provided a really level playing field for the conversations.

"So we had that confidence not that we were getting in, but in the way we were being treated, which was very equitably. Which felt fantastic.

"Then getting closer to the decision we suddenly had all the cricket press, which felt quite overpowering. I would say at that point I didn’t personally feel that confident because it felt like there was this huge distraction.

"Was it going to be the LA decision? Was it going to be the IOC’s decision? It felt less clear. And especially being in the UK where cricket is so huge, that was obviously headline news. It felt like anything could happen.

"So then when we got the news from the WSF that we were going to be on the LA 20208 proposed list, that felt like it came out of nowhere, because it did slightly feel like the process had gone a little bit awry from our point of view.

"And then obviously it’s a very long week, knowing you are on that list but that it still needs ratification by the IOC! There are so many people involved at the IOC level, and so many power struggles I guess."

In the interim Gough attended the US Open in Philadelphia. "I did my best to just not think about it because of our history of not quite getting it over the line I didn't dare to believe until it was actually 100 per cent official."

Upon landing back in the UK, Gough switched on his phone just in time to watch the live voting at the IOC Session in Mumbai on a YouTube link.

"I was still on the plane with my headphones on and I saw it live there first time. One slightly crazy person on the flight…"

While Gough required to see the last full stop of the sentence before allowing himself to celebrate, Zena Wooldridge, who took over as WSF President in 2020, experienced what she describes as the "heart jump" with the confirmation that squash had made the list of five new sports on the LA list from a shortlist of nine.

"Probably my biggest heart jump was when I received the letter from LA last Friday,” Wooldridge told insidethegames from Mumbai, where she was preparing to fly back home after the IOC Session.

"That was probably the biggest heartbeat - when I had to pick up the letter and say, 'Hang on, I’m not sure this is true, I’m not sure this is real. I think I might have to go and pinch myself. I think I might just have to have a night’s sleep and wake up in the morning and see if it’s all a dream.' So that was exciting.

"We had a degree of optimism beforehand. I was probably 50-50. I’m not sure about Alex! He kept saying he had been involved in so many Olympic bids that he wasn’t going to believe it until it had got over the line."

After so many unsuccessful bids, it was no surprise if squash was a little bit cynical about the whole process.

“We had said to the IOC, 'If we are going to embark upon another Olympic bid please be honest with us about the chances of us achieving success because we can’t afford to be raising funding for another Olympic bid and then it’s money down the drain'," Wooldridge said.

"And the IOC said for a further Olympic bid the condition will be that you do not spend money on it.

"The second condition came from LA 2028, which was that this process had to be below the radar. It was not to be made public."

Since Olympic inclusion was confirmed, however, Wooldridge has been fielding an unprecedented number of calls and messages. "That’s reflective of what’s happening around the world. I don’t think we had any doubt that the sport would absolutely erupt when it got the news."

Wooldridge’s gaze, however, is already fixed beyond LA 2028. "Although we hope to be getting support from the IOC for the 2028 preparations, you don’t get Olympic Solidarity funding until you have been in at least two consecutive Olympics," she said.

“So we are already thinking of how we stay in for the Brisbane 2032 Games. But to be honest if you’d asked us two years ago we would probably have thought that Brisbane was our best chance rather than Los Angeles.

"Our discussions with Squash Australia about how we manage the runway into Brisbane 2032 have suddenly been put on a different trajectory, because the decision on which sports will be at Brisbane 2032 will be made before the delivery at Los Angeles 2028.

"So we can’t rely upon a fantastic delivery at LA because the decision will have been made before. It’s like the situation breaking has had – they are in Paris, but they have already been told they won’t be in LA."

There is definitely no sense of the WSF or PSA resting on their laurels.

"We face that same timescale which means we are really going to have to lobby and do a good job and influence Brisbane and hope that they will also include squash for our second consecutive Games." Wooldridge said. "And then once we’ve done two..

"Meanwhile the talk on the ground is that the next one may be in India 2036. And if that were the case then we’ve got good foundations in India to potentially make it a third. But we’ve got to make the second one first!”

Wooldridge's urgency is echoed by Gough, who claimed he feels "very confident" about the future of squash at the Olympics after Los Angeles.

"We are already looking at what we have to do to stay in the Olympics - you’d like to think it is easier staying in than getting in but we won’t be taking anything for granted," he said.

"That is an aim of everybody involved - we don’t just want to be one event and then you’re out again.

"Squash Australia are really doing a good job and we are hoping to have some bigger events down there in the next one or two years, with LA on the horizon.

"We’ve actually already had meeting with the city of Brisbane - this was a year or so ago. So that will come very high up in our ambitions, to have a major event there. With the Olympics in mind really - because we really want to be staying in."