 Olivier Marteel in 2013 | |
| Born | 10 May 1969 Nieuwpoort, Belgium, Flanders, Belgium |
|---|---|
| Sport country |  Belgium |
| Professional | 2006–present |
Olivier Marteel (born 10 May 1969) [1] is a Belgian professional snooker referee who officiates on the World Snooker Tour.
Born in Nieuwpoort, Marteel now lives in Gijverinkhove. He first qualified as a referee in 1994, and began refereeing on the main professional tour in 2006. [2] He took charge of his first World Snooker Championship final in 2015, becoming the first Belgian to referee a world final, and the second referee from continental Europe to do so, after Jan Verhaas. Marteel refereed his second world final in 2022. [3] In addition to the World Championships, Marteel has officiated the Masters final twice, in 2016 and 2018, and the UK Championship final twice, in 2016 and 2020. [4] He also plays snooker, and has achieved highest breaks of 133 in practice and 78 in competition. [2]
Marteel is a qualified nurse and has been nursing since his twenty-first birthday. [5] He worked in the frontline as a nurse in Belgium during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite being trained as a radiologist. [6] [7] [8]
In the 2023 World Snooker Championship, he prevented a Just Stop Oil protester from gluing herself to the table; this occurred moments after another protester had covered the opposite table in orange powder. The match overseen by Marteel resumed shortly after the interruption, while the other match was delayed to the next day. [9] [10]
Snooker is a cue sport played on a rectangular billiards table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six pockets, one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. First played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century, the game is played with twenty-two balls, comprising a white cue ball, fifteen red balls, and six other balls—a yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black—collectively called the colours. Using a cue stick, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the cue ball to pot other balls in a predefined sequence, accumulating points for each successful pot and for each time the opposing player or team commits a foul. An individual frame of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points. A snooker match ends when a player reaches a predetermined number of frames.
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