Gregory Gaultier won four silver medals at the squash World Open (Championships) over 10 years, before he struck his first gold. In an illustrious career spanning 22 long years, starting out as a French prodigy, he ended with nine Worlds medals, including four bronze. Now, tasked with guiding young Indian talent Anahat Singh, the deep-thinking Frenchman brings a unique understanding of losing from winning positions and, learning from those defeats and never letting go of the ambition, before the gold is finally nailed. The 43-year-old would reckon ‘choke’ is a very English word, and in a very Albert Camus-fashion embraces the absurdity of keeping on losing, while keeping on wanting to win, in a way that only sport could quantify. “Today, if I flashback that first hard loss of a Worlds final in 2006, I’ll ask myself, ‘Gregory, if you had won that final, would life have turned out the same? Would I have done it all’?” he wonders, in an interaction before heading to India for the JSW Open in Mumbai, where Anahat will …