Stephen McDermott

Yeah, hey, Clare.

Yeah, you mentioned there he's only 22 years old, like really young.

He's the second ever, or second youngest ever world champion after Stephen Hendry, who I think a lot of people who are familiar with snooker might know.

But yeah, this guy, he only turned professional in 2021.

He came from China.

He's from Lanzhou, which is a city in the northwest of China.

And

A few years ago, he decided, I'm going to drop out of school.

I'm going to go over to the UK.

We're kind of the home of snooker and practice my game there and hope I'm kind of making pro and eventually becoming world champion, which is what he's done.

You know, he came over with his dad and his nan stayed in China.

She had kind of health issues while she was over there as well.

And in a victory speech the other night, he kind of thanked both his parents for always having his back.

So yeah, it's really, really interesting.

Such a young guy and to make that commitment at such a young age is a huge thing to come halfway across the world to eventually become world champion.

Yeah it's taken off I mean kind of the last 20 years or so but I mean like even now you know you look at the world rankings the top 16 is generally where it's at and there's currently five players including Wu in that top 16 you know there was this guy called Bing Junwei he started it all off and he's kind of seen as like the main guy who's brought snooker mainstream in China so he's been around for the past 20 years or so and

He had a couple of big victories, and then the Chinese government heavily invested in the sport.

There's talk now of opening this big arena in China with a thousand tables.

I don't even know if there's a thousand tables in Ireland or the UK, and they're talking about opening one place that's there.

Hundreds of thousands of people play it over there every day.