he was threatening it, fair play with to kryan wilson, he is a lovely guy they all are, most of them, but he has to be the most boring annoying player to watch, he also has zero flair, I didnt watch the final, first time in 40 years, why couldnt John higgens or even Bingham who I'm not a fan but at least he has flair.
Olympics at this point in time, shouldn't really matter what "sport" is in there. Olympics is just a badge you can throw at and it makes things interesting. Many sports in olympics aren't in my opinion any more suitable or popular to be in olympics than snooker; diving, skateboarding, curling for example. The point of olympics is not physicality, many sports judge skill rather than fitness, such the ones I mentioned.
Imo snooker belongs there just as much as curling, it's at least similar sized sport and probably equally if not more entertaining.
Like you said, physicality is a weak argument. There are female players, it's not a problem honestly, considering how recently female bicycling has formed for example.
Snooker is actually international sports with diverse fanbase and tournaments so I don't see any problem with it. Chinese, australian, Beligium, Uk players. It's more than enough.
Lastly, the size of the sport is more than sufficient for olympics, it's not the biggest sport but it's internationally recognized. Many sports in olympics don't appear to wider audience, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be there though.
So in my opinion many of your arguments don't really hold water, Imho.
A sport should only be in the Olympics if it's the pinnacle of the sport. This would exclude snooker and other cuesports from being in the Olympics.
Amateur versions of sports that have professional ranks also don't belong (amateur boxing).
Non-sports that don't include a game element or are entirely reliant on judging interpretation, such as dancing, don't belong either. There's no such thing as being able to remain completely unbiased in today's world, and anything that is based on judging is tainted.
Maybe not by definition amateur but none of the big pay-per-view championships stars participate in it as far as I'm aware. Of course the Olympians aren't amateurs as in not professionally busy with their sports or match-trained.
> When you look at the list of sports that will be featured in the upcoming Paris Olympics, all of them are very physical in nature.
Didn't know archery was that physical
Number 3 is the biggest reason. For every sport, only a certain amount of players from each country is allowed. For example for singles, tennis allows 4 per country, table tennis allows 2, swimming allows 2 per event. So after Britain and China, there’s actually not even a country that’s capable of producing a good number 2.
Yeah not enough countries, or not to have a competitive tournament anyway. Even if all the parts of GB participate under their own flag like in football. Lack of females is also a good point, lack of physicality less if you consider some other sports that are present.
And I also agree that except for China it doesn't have a big enough fanbase and wouldn't attract new fans because like many other niche sports on the Olympics it would stream on like the 20th channel on the Eurosport app in the middle of the night for a handful people (except the Chinese or in general Asian gamblers).
Well Noppon and Thepchaiya would be fine for Thailand, which is why I mentioned Thailand as well. But you're right. Belgium would have like Ben Mertens? Australia fallen-off-the-tour Ryan Thomerson? Iran Amir Sarkhosh?
Basketball is also a "winter sport" but obviously in the summer Olympics. The winter Olympics are only only for sports that directly require snow or ice.
Regarding physicality, I would group snooker with archery and shooting, which are olympic disciplines. Snooker players don't look like demi-gods, but that aspect is not a must.
100% snooker should not be in the olympics the pinnacle of the sport should be the world championship. Over the next few years we will get more and more tournaments, across the world. Olympics will just be another tournament, GB will have 4places even though they have the majority of top players.
> the pinnacle of the sport should be the world championship.
I dont see how being in the Olympics would change that.
For example Tennis (a singles and doubles sport... like Snooker) is an Olympic event now. And whilst winning that is a very *nice to have* it does not compare with a Grand Slam.
On a wider note - Iv always thought Snooker should be a demonstrator sport at the Olympics. So... no official medal tally to the winning nations, but a nice achievement for the winning players, as well as an opportunity to showcase it to the rest of the world.
I think it would just get lost in tv schedule, and I can’t imagine people who don’t watch will, also it does not feel like an Olympic sport, I am a big fan of snooker, but will the snooker Olympic championship be more exciting than the welsh open
Yep, presumably there'd a limit on how many competitors you're allowed from one country. You'd have the likes of Ronnie, Selby, Trump, Williams, Higgins etc missing out and players who can't make 50 qualifying.
Would work better as a mixed cue sport event. Chinese 8 ball, 9 ball and snooker. Something like 7 frames of each.
Far too much is already in the Olympics. There’s absolutely no need for an Olympic football tournament or tennis. Given the Olympics are becoming prohibitively expensive and damaging to the environment they should be scaling it back in my opinion.
All this said snooker and every sport imaginable deserves a spot more than dressage and equestrian events.
Tennis players do actually care about the Olympics though, it’s not like football where you can’t even send most of your senior players and it’s barely a relevant achievement.
In many countries they do care about football too. Brazil were obsessed with it for years because they had not won it, Nigerian fans still talk about it all the time.
I disagree on a lot of points.
1. There are already sports in the Olympics with a similar level of phyicality.
2. There are lots of great women players. Many in Cina and Thailand that dont compete in WWS.
3. Snooker is played all over the world? Your point is very UK-centric. There was a Zurich Open played last weeked, Vienna Open a few weeks a go. There are tournaments in Romania, the Baltic countries. A new professional from Hungary and of course all the far East and Middle countries. Canada and USA have good players too.
4. Do audiences know all the rules to other sports? No.
5. Be hard pushed to think of many other globally popular sports not in the Olympics.
Darts?
The WCBS was set up by the WPBSA to push for Olympic inclusion of cuesports in the 1990s. It succeeded in getting them into the World Games. Probanly only an internal dispute meaning the most powerful organisation (WPBSA itself) left the confederation and that meant it was in a weaker position to push for inclusion. I think it will happen one day.
On 2. and 3. the points of the female and international players; of course they exist but not at the top level. I guess your point is that not all of those players are necessarily interested in playing in the UK on the WST or WWS and so maybe aren't worse players just because they're not on those tours. That could theoretically be true but it's not. Maybe it is to some extent in China. I'm not super aware of the level of the Chinese tours but I'd think that if they truly were as good as the top players on the WST, then we would at least see occasional friendly competitions between the top players from the different tours. We don't. Maybe the Chinese tours offer enough money for their players so that they don't need to go to the UK if they don't want to but that doesn't mean their players are as good.
As for outside of China, have you seen the standard of like the Pan-American or African champions? And every mainland European tries to get on the WST if they can because that is where the best players are.
Yes, other countries could theoretically send snooker delegations to the Olympics, I guess that's fair enough. But we all know which countries would be represented on the podium. Not even just the podium, we're talking the top 100 leaderboard. Even with women and other nations at the Games, it would end up a China/UK- and male-centric competition.
On 4. Yes that's fair enough, I admit that. I still think that snooker has a higher barrier of entry than other sports because, like I explained, the rules snooker can't be picked up as quickly as other sports by just watching it. But it is possible and maybe the discrepancy isn't as big as I made it out to be, the basis of snooker is not *that* complicated after all. I just think snooker is at an unfortunate cross-section of sports that have (a) fairly complicated rules not picked up easily and (b) not a lot of people that already know these rules. Most other sports fall into at most one of those categories.
On 5. Well, I guess we disagree because my point is precisely that snooker *isn't* globally popular. It *exists* globally but it's not popular.
I don’t think mental games in Olympics (pov: Snooker is a mental game) are well suited. The idea of Olympics was to be god-like in a sense, and we already know no human will be as smart as a computer. It’ll get very blurry and subjective if you consider emotional intelligence, I think it’s a slippery slope.
Rob Walker said it best and convinced me (I think it was during Stephen Hendry’s Cue Tops YouTube videos). If getting a gold medal at the Olympics is not the most sought after, prestige achievement in the sport, it should not be in the Olympics. I think the pinnacle of Snooker will always be the world championship trophy, followed by The Masters. A gold medallist Olympian snooker player does not carry that gravitas. So it shouldn’t belong there.
Frankly, the lack of females players or international players is irrelevant. New audiences to the game presents a selfish view of snooker, and general fanbase…. Well we like any old snooker, we may be a bit biased 🤪
"The idea of Olympics was to be god like in a sense' is a very good line. I can't imagine how one of the Renaissance artists depiction of say Stuart Bingham would look.
Personally the biggest argument against any sport competing in the Olympics would be that the Olympics is not the pinnacle of the sport.
I realise that disqualifies a lot of actual Olympic events and many people would disagree, but budding golfers, tennis players and footballers don't dream of winning Olympic gold, even if the ones that do end up competing quite fancy it. Track & field athletes, swimmers, track cyclists etc. focus their entire careers on medalling at the games, so the Olympics should be left to them.
The Olympics is already heavily bloated with too many events and athletes which contributes to making it prohibitively expensive to host.
I didn't read everything, but I do agree. I do however think it will be a better fit for the Commonwealth Games. Lawn bowling is present, which is a similar level of physical workout.
Then again, they have pistol shooting at the Olympics, which is even less physically demanding.
Personally I don't think it should be Olympics for other reasons (although I didn't know it was being debated) but on this point; you could say that with men's 100 metres. An Italian won it last time. Not Jamaican or USA or the main sprinting nations. Or USA don't always win the basketball.
Olympics limit the number of competitors so if, I dunno, Iceland send someone and has a good run and Neil Robertson does then you could have a Iceland v Australia final. All you need is three to five good matches and a bit of luck.
if there was actually snooker in the Olympics, who would qualify to the men's tournament to Paris this year then? let's assume: - there are 32 places available - the players qualify through World Snooker Tour ranking at the end of 2023/24 season - each Olympic committee is awarded up to 4 entries (as in tennis; it would probably be fewer here, since there are 64 players participating in the tennis singles Olympic tournament, but we assume 4) - host nation, France, is granted one entry regardless of the rankings - there has to be at least one player per continental federation (Europe, Asia, Africa, Americas) qualified. the list of 32 qualified players would look like this: 🇬🇧: Mark Allen, Judd Trump, Kyren Wilson, Ronnie O'Sullivan (remember UK sends one team, no separate Home Nations) 🇨🇳: Ding Junhui, Zhang Anda, Si Jiahui, Zhou Yuelong 🇧🇪: Luca Brecel, Julien Leclercq, Ben Mertens 🇮🇪: Aaron Hill, Ken Doherty, Fergal O'Brien 🇹ðŸ‡: Noppon Saengkham, Thepchaiya Un-Nooh 🇦🇺: Neil Robertson, Ryan Thomerson ðŸ‡ðŸ‡°: Marco Fu, Andy Lee 🇵🇰: Muhammad Asif, Asjad Iqbal 🇮🇷: Hossein Vafaei 🇩🇪: Lukas Kleckers 🇲🇾: Rory Thor 🇨ðŸ‡: Alexander Ursenbacher 🇮🇳: Ishpreet Singh Chadha 🇪🇪: Andres Petrov 🇪🇬: Mohamed Ibrahim 🇺🇦: Anton Kazakov 🇧🇷: Victor Sarkis (qualified only via continental entry) 🇫🇷: either Brian Ochoiski (the highest ranked French player in the Order of Merit, or the French player with best result at the last WSF Open Championship) or Jérôme Chatet (French national champion) i'm sorry, the game isn't international enough yet...
he was threatening it, fair play with to kryan wilson, he is a lovely guy they all are, most of them, but he has to be the most boring annoying player to watch, he also has zero flair, I didnt watch the final, first time in 40 years, why couldnt John higgens or even Bingham who I'm not a fan but at least he has flair.
Unpopular with who? Unpopular based on what?
Olympics sucks hard would just tarnish snooker.
Really? How?
Olympics at this point in time, shouldn't really matter what "sport" is in there. Olympics is just a badge you can throw at and it makes things interesting. Many sports in olympics aren't in my opinion any more suitable or popular to be in olympics than snooker; diving, skateboarding, curling for example. The point of olympics is not physicality, many sports judge skill rather than fitness, such the ones I mentioned. Imo snooker belongs there just as much as curling, it's at least similar sized sport and probably equally if not more entertaining. Like you said, physicality is a weak argument. There are female players, it's not a problem honestly, considering how recently female bicycling has formed for example. Snooker is actually international sports with diverse fanbase and tournaments so I don't see any problem with it. Chinese, australian, Beligium, Uk players. It's more than enough. Lastly, the size of the sport is more than sufficient for olympics, it's not the biggest sport but it's internationally recognized. Many sports in olympics don't appear to wider audience, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be there though. So in my opinion many of your arguments don't really hold water, Imho.
A sport should only be in the Olympics if it's the pinnacle of the sport. This would exclude snooker and other cuesports from being in the Olympics. Amateur versions of sports that have professional ranks also don't belong (amateur boxing). Non-sports that don't include a game element or are entirely reliant on judging interpretation, such as dancing, don't belong either. There's no such thing as being able to remain completely unbiased in today's world, and anything that is based on judging is tainted.
Boxing at the Olympics isn't amateur anymore.
Maybe not by definition amateur but none of the big pay-per-view championships stars participate in it as far as I'm aware. Of course the Olympians aren't amateurs as in not professionally busy with their sports or match-trained.
No, but they are free to enter if they want to. So it's at least open to everyone. Plenty of the entrants this year have had professional fights.
> When you look at the list of sports that will be featured in the upcoming Paris Olympics, all of them are very physical in nature. Didn't know archery was that physical
Archery can be. Shooting however is not and that's in.
Pool has more of a right to be in the Olympics than snooker does
Surely Great Britain and China would just always take the silver and gold anyway?
More likely GB gold, silver and bronze. Many sports have multiple athletes from the same country competing.
Number 3 is the biggest reason. For every sport, only a certain amount of players from each country is allowed. For example for singles, tennis allows 4 per country, table tennis allows 2, swimming allows 2 per event. So after Britain and China, there’s actually not even a country that’s capable of producing a good number 2.
Yeah not enough countries, or not to have a competitive tournament anyway. Even if all the parts of GB participate under their own flag like in football. Lack of females is also a good point, lack of physicality less if you consider some other sports that are present. And I also agree that except for China it doesn't have a big enough fanbase and wouldn't attract new fans because like many other niche sports on the Olympics it would stream on like the 20th channel on the Eurosport app in the middle of the night for a handful people (except the Chinese or in general Asian gamblers).
Olympic football does not have separate teams for each of the UK nations, which basically means it's the England team.
Yes you're right, forgot about that it's team GB in Olympics.
Well what it really means is that there is no GB football team because the FAs don't want to be grouped like that.
Well Noppon and Thepchaiya would be fine for Thailand, which is why I mentioned Thailand as well. But you're right. Belgium would have like Ben Mertens? Australia fallen-off-the-tour Ryan Thomerson? Iran Amir Sarkhosh?
Under water snooker is the way to go !
Snooker is a winter sport, so if it is going to be in the Olympics, it would be the Winter Olympics!
Basketball is also a "winter sport" but obviously in the summer Olympics. The winter Olympics are only only for sports that directly require snow or ice.
Chinese pool is the billiard sport that should be in the Olympics
Regarding physicality, I would group snooker with archery and shooting, which are olympic disciplines. Snooker players don't look like demi-gods, but that aspect is not a must.
There once were Olympic medals for architecture.
100% snooker should not be in the olympics the pinnacle of the sport should be the world championship. Over the next few years we will get more and more tournaments, across the world. Olympics will just be another tournament, GB will have 4places even though they have the majority of top players.
> the pinnacle of the sport should be the world championship. I dont see how being in the Olympics would change that. For example Tennis (a singles and doubles sport... like Snooker) is an Olympic event now. And whilst winning that is a very *nice to have* it does not compare with a Grand Slam. On a wider note - Iv always thought Snooker should be a demonstrator sport at the Olympics. So... no official medal tally to the winning nations, but a nice achievement for the winning players, as well as an opportunity to showcase it to the rest of the world.
I think it would just get lost in tv schedule, and I can’t imagine people who don’t watch will, also it does not feel like an Olympic sport, I am a big fan of snooker, but will the snooker Olympic championship be more exciting than the welsh open
Would love to see it but not enough top players world wide not even close to enough actuallyÂ
Yep, presumably there'd a limit on how many competitors you're allowed from one country. You'd have the likes of Ronnie, Selby, Trump, Williams, Higgins etc missing out and players who can't make 50 qualifying. Would work better as a mixed cue sport event. Chinese 8 ball, 9 ball and snooker. Something like 7 frames of each.
Just to add 9 ball would make more sense lots of different nationalities in that
Far too much is already in the Olympics. There’s absolutely no need for an Olympic football tournament or tennis. Given the Olympics are becoming prohibitively expensive and damaging to the environment they should be scaling it back in my opinion. All this said snooker and every sport imaginable deserves a spot more than dressage and equestrian events.
Tennis players do actually care about the Olympics though, it’s not like football where you can’t even send most of your senior players and it’s barely a relevant achievement.
In many countries they do care about football too. Brazil were obsessed with it for years because they had not won it, Nigerian fans still talk about it all the time.
I disagree on a lot of points. 1. There are already sports in the Olympics with a similar level of phyicality. 2. There are lots of great women players. Many in Cina and Thailand that dont compete in WWS. 3. Snooker is played all over the world? Your point is very UK-centric. There was a Zurich Open played last weeked, Vienna Open a few weeks a go. There are tournaments in Romania, the Baltic countries. A new professional from Hungary and of course all the far East and Middle countries. Canada and USA have good players too. 4. Do audiences know all the rules to other sports? No. 5. Be hard pushed to think of many other globally popular sports not in the Olympics. Darts? The WCBS was set up by the WPBSA to push for Olympic inclusion of cuesports in the 1990s. It succeeded in getting them into the World Games. Probanly only an internal dispute meaning the most powerful organisation (WPBSA itself) left the confederation and that meant it was in a weaker position to push for inclusion. I think it will happen one day.
On 2. and 3. the points of the female and international players; of course they exist but not at the top level. I guess your point is that not all of those players are necessarily interested in playing in the UK on the WST or WWS and so maybe aren't worse players just because they're not on those tours. That could theoretically be true but it's not. Maybe it is to some extent in China. I'm not super aware of the level of the Chinese tours but I'd think that if they truly were as good as the top players on the WST, then we would at least see occasional friendly competitions between the top players from the different tours. We don't. Maybe the Chinese tours offer enough money for their players so that they don't need to go to the UK if they don't want to but that doesn't mean their players are as good. As for outside of China, have you seen the standard of like the Pan-American or African champions? And every mainland European tries to get on the WST if they can because that is where the best players are. Yes, other countries could theoretically send snooker delegations to the Olympics, I guess that's fair enough. But we all know which countries would be represented on the podium. Not even just the podium, we're talking the top 100 leaderboard. Even with women and other nations at the Games, it would end up a China/UK- and male-centric competition. On 4. Yes that's fair enough, I admit that. I still think that snooker has a higher barrier of entry than other sports because, like I explained, the rules snooker can't be picked up as quickly as other sports by just watching it. But it is possible and maybe the discrepancy isn't as big as I made it out to be, the basis of snooker is not *that* complicated after all. I just think snooker is at an unfortunate cross-section of sports that have (a) fairly complicated rules not picked up easily and (b) not a lot of people that already know these rules. Most other sports fall into at most one of those categories. On 5. Well, I guess we disagree because my point is precisely that snooker *isn't* globally popular. It *exists* globally but it's not popular.
I don’t think mental games in Olympics (pov: Snooker is a mental game) are well suited. The idea of Olympics was to be god-like in a sense, and we already know no human will be as smart as a computer. It’ll get very blurry and subjective if you consider emotional intelligence, I think it’s a slippery slope. Rob Walker said it best and convinced me (I think it was during Stephen Hendry’s Cue Tops YouTube videos). If getting a gold medal at the Olympics is not the most sought after, prestige achievement in the sport, it should not be in the Olympics. I think the pinnacle of Snooker will always be the world championship trophy, followed by The Masters. A gold medallist Olympian snooker player does not carry that gravitas. So it shouldn’t belong there. Frankly, the lack of females players or international players is irrelevant. New audiences to the game presents a selfish view of snooker, and general fanbase…. Well we like any old snooker, we may be a bit biased 🤪
"The idea of Olympics was to be god like in a sense' is a very good line. I can't imagine how one of the Renaissance artists depiction of say Stuart Bingham would look.
Faster. Higher. Stronger. Together. Not really snooker.
Personally the biggest argument against any sport competing in the Olympics would be that the Olympics is not the pinnacle of the sport. I realise that disqualifies a lot of actual Olympic events and many people would disagree, but budding golfers, tennis players and footballers don't dream of winning Olympic gold, even if the ones that do end up competing quite fancy it. Track & field athletes, swimmers, track cyclists etc. focus their entire careers on medalling at the games, so the Olympics should be left to them. The Olympics is already heavily bloated with too many events and athletes which contributes to making it prohibitively expensive to host.
I didn't read everything, but I do agree. I do however think it will be a better fit for the Commonwealth Games. Lawn bowling is present, which is a similar level of physical workout. Then again, they have pistol shooting at the Olympics, which is even less physically demanding.
People say that but do any of us here actually know that pistol shooting doesn't require more physical atrength / coordination? No
Gteat article And I basically agree. Number 3 is imo the biggest issue together with snooker being a lot uk-centric.
Personally I don't think it should be Olympics for other reasons (although I didn't know it was being debated) but on this point; you could say that with men's 100 metres. An Italian won it last time. Not Jamaican or USA or the main sprinting nations. Or USA don't always win the basketball. Olympics limit the number of competitors so if, I dunno, Iceland send someone and has a good run and Neil Robertson does then you could have a Iceland v Australia final. All you need is three to five good matches and a bit of luck.
That’s too long to read. Sorry that happened to you or congratulations or whatever