On Monday night Wu Yize stood under the Crucible spotlights with the World Snooker Championship trophy in his arms. On Tuesday morning the 22-year-old turned to the people who had made the moment possible.
"My sincere thanks to my parents," Wu said. "They are the real champions."
That sentiment was echoed in a longer post on Chinese social media platform Weibo, where he wrote, "I will always love you sincerely, truly and completely," and again at the BBC, where he reflected on a journey that had taken his family from Foshan in southern China to a flat in Sheffield, the city that has become the unofficial second home of the men's snooker tour.
Wu's path into the sport began in his hometown under Australian coach Roger Leighton, who helped found a junior academy in Foshan and remembers a confident pre-teen who quickly outgrew the local circuit.
"He was a cheeky little kid at 11 years old," Leighton told Metro. "He was cheeky and funny, and his high break increased to 70-odd."
The leap to professional was the family's leap, too. His father closed his antique shop in China; his mother, who has battled poor health for years, came with the family across continents. They settled in a single windowless room in Sheffield while Wu trained and tried to make sense of life in a country whose language and customs were new to him.
"Especially the first year when I arrived in the U.K. to train and play, I wasn't mentally in a good place," Wu told The Sun.
The relationship with his mother became central to how he coped. Her health limited her ability to travel, even as the family stayed in the UK, and her absence from the Crucible audience for much of the 2026 fortnight drew Wu's eye more than once between sessions.
"My mum wasn't in very good health condition for a long time," he told the BBC. "She sacrificed everything for me. At that time she told me 'don't come back home, I can manage everything'. She means everything to me."
Monday's final brought one of the season's defining images: Wu's mother arriving in Sheffield in time to watch her son lift the trophy.
"This is the second time my mom has visited me in the U.K.," Wu said. "My parents are the true champions."
The figures in the immediate aftermath were stark. With the £500,000 winner's cheque, his earnings for the season passed £860,000. He becomes the second Chinese player to win the world title, the second-youngest world champion in the sport's history and, after Zhao Xintong's 2025 breakthrough, the second consecutive Chinese world champion at the Crucible.
For Wu, however, the numbers did less work than the people. His response to a deciding-frame triumph in front of a Sheffield crowd was to point not at himself, but at the windowless room and the parents who lived in it for him. "The real champions," he repeated, "are them."