World Snooker Championship: Meet snooker referee and nurse Olivier Marteel who halted Crucible protester

Olivier Marteel may be recognisable as the stoic referee often seen officiating big matches at the World Snooker Championship, but there is a lot more to him than just that.

The Belgian, who was born in Nieuwpoort, began refereeing on the main professional tour in 2006 and has not looked back since as he has taken charge of many of the sport’s most memorable moments on the biggest stages.

Speaking to Eurosport prior to the tournament, Marteel spoke about the journey he went on to become a referee, how he fell in love with the sport, and how he managed to juggle his love for snooker with being a part-time nurse.

“I’m 53 and I’ve been nursing since my 21st birthday, so that’s 30 odd years,” Marteel told Eurosport’s The Power of Sport show.

“I started ref-ing professionally in 2005. I’ve been nursing since my 21st birthday, which is a long time ago, 30-odd years ago. I’ve been a professional snooker referee since 2005.

“The nursing was something I knew [I wanted to do] from when I was a boy. I was six, seven years old, and I already told my mum I remembered that in the bathroom in our first house years and years ago I wanted to be a doctor. Where that came from, I don’t know. It’s a calling, they say, but because of circumstances which I’m not going to explore more, I had to study to be a nurse.

“I had discovered snooker through my grandfather in ’83, ’84 on TV when the BBC started to come over in the west with those big antennas on the roof of the house and because digital and all those things didn’t exist in those days.

“The hobby started there just as a player, and then in ’94, I joined a new club. In Belgium, every club needs to have an official referee, and every snooker clerk needs to have an official referee. So the owner said, ‘you’ve been playing for more than 10 years now, maybe you can, you know, do something else for the club’.

“I went, ‘okay’, so for a few Coca-Colas – because I’m a Coca-Cola drinker – I will do it. Then I was discovered by a person called Daniel Bolting, who in the meantime became my godfather, and he took me everywhere in Europe [including] the European Championships for youth, seniors, men and women teams.”

Marteel has since gone on to become a very accomplished official on the big stage, as he went on to explain.

“It grew from there, and in 2005, I tried to go to the UK and show them what I could do, and I don’t think I’ve done such a bad job because so many years later, I’ve done so many things,” he said.

“It is now a matter of trying to find the time to work as a nurse and also trying to find the time, when they call me or when they send me an invitation, to say yes to World Snooker, to be able to go wherever they want me to go.

“Oh, I just fell in love with it. ’83, ’84. The first time I saw it on TV was the Steve Davis era in the ’80s. Alex Higgins, John Parrott, Jimmy White, you name them. I just saw it on TV and I said, ‘oh, that’s what I want to do in my life’. At first as a player, and then I discovered that I wasn’t good enough to become a professional.

“So that’s why I just like kind of fell into the referee department by mistake. I just fell in love with the game. It’s simple as when you see the right woman and you say, ‘oh, my god, this is the one’. Snooker was the one for me.

“I missed two World Championships because of Covid. For me, that was like having an arm cut off or a leg cut off. It’s like a kid who has received gifts and toys and then suddenly, for more than a year, doesn’t receive anything anymore.

“There are so many billions of people in the world and you are one of the chosen few to referee at the Crucible, at the Mecca of snooker. I mean, it can’t get any better than that. You can’t get any higher than that.”

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