Manya Koetse

Yeah, well, I think I personally, I studied in China and I lived there and I remember that was around 2008, 2010.

And snooker was super big at the time.

That was actually the moment when you saw snooker halls mushrooming across Chinese cities everywhere.

Of course, the barrier to enter is very low.

You know, it's perfect for the urban environment.

But what really started it happened a few years before that.

That was in 2005.

And that was with the big win of Ding Junhui, who is really seen as the father of snooker in China.

And I think what you see with him is that it's kind of the hero effect.

It's a little bit with what Yao Ming did with basketball in China.

He's really become the face for that.

And what followed later was the ranking events and the snooker academy and the competitions.

But I think you should really see him as the foundational figure of Chinese snooker.

He has, he has.

His story is also quite inspiring because, I mean, he went really big, obviously, but he never won the title that Wu has now.

And at the meantime, he's been quite public about his mental health struggles, which is quite inspiring, while running this academy funded substantially from his own earnings.

Yeah, I think it's quite admirable what he's done.

Oh, yes, definitely.

And one of the comments that was made, I'm not sure if it was yesterday or the day before, after Wu's win, came from Ding Junhui on his Weibo account.

So Weibo is the biggest social media platform in China.