How can niche sports sidestep the elite playbook to forge a future in Hong Kong? Lu Wanqing traces the city’s niche sports’ champions in their long quest to navigate limited resources to secure growth and legitimacy for their non-Olympic disciplines.
At first glance, Hong Kong’s reign of over five decades as snooker’s Asian bridgehead offers the sport a cherished crown jewel in its own identity.
The city has forged homegrown legends like Marco Fu Ka-chun and Ng On-yee, while drawing global icons Ronnie O’Sullivan and Judd Trump to its fold.
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Such an unmatched command has ignited record-shattering spectacles. The 2022 Hong Kong Masters drew the largest live crowd, while the 2025 World Grand Prix offered the biggest prize purse in the tournament’s history.
Yet beneath the glitter lies a raw reality — snooker’s “exile” from the Olympics and absence from the Asian Games since 2010 have left it dangling over an abyss due to Hong Kong’s sports funding policy of an implied elite-focused, medal-chasing narrative.
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s Elite Vote Support Scheme — the arbiter of the city’s sports funding — mandated a requirement for its Tier-A funding status to log at least three appearances in the past four, or the next two Olympic or Asian Games.
A downgrade to Tier B would mean an 80 percent budget cut.
It’s cold math. With four consecutive Asian Games entries (1998-2010) and zero Olympic inclusion so far, snooker has been one shy of the required three appearances since EVSS’ eligibility window slammed shut on pre-2006 history after the 2018 Asian Games.
From that point, every biannual review became a nerve-wracking ritual for Hong Kong’s cue artists. By March, tension had peaked as the 2021-25 funding cycle neared its month-end expiry.
On Mar 17, Hong Kong Billiard Sports Control Council Chairman Vincent Law Wing-chung’s composure cracked despite his steeling for the worst.
Since snooker’s exclusion from the 2026 Nagoya Asian Games, the council has waged a relentless campaign to fend off possible relegation.
The BSCC produced the documentary The Unsung Masters, which unfolded the behind-the-scenes story of the 2022 Hong Kong Masters, to galvanize public appreciation for the sport and blanket the public sphere with calls for awareness and support.
“With just days remaining, there’s not much we can do. Without policy flexibility, we would fail despite maxing out athlete performance scores, as one of only two Tier-A sports that did (in the latest review round),” says Law.
In hindsight, the nail-biting proved unnecessary. A week later, on Mar 24, the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau delivered salvation.
Billiard sports — including snooker — and tennis, which had also faced a probable Tier-A demotion, have retained their top-tier status, along with eight others ascending, including golf, to Tier A, and canoeing and waterskiing, among others, making it into Tier B.
The bureau rewrote the rules book, with snooker’s eligibility window stretching to all post-1997 Olympic and Asian Games and tennis now equally valuing calendar Grand Slams — consecutive wins of the sport’s four major tournaments, plus Davis Cup or Billie Jean King Cup titles alongside Olympic and Asian Games participation.
Snooker had a narrow escape this time, but its brushing with a budget trimming laid bare a deeper development conundrum for the likes of such non-Olympic disciplines that have yet to attract great enough global traction to take to an elite-dominated system like a duck to water.
Community outreach
The HKSAR government’s sports development blueprint has cast an all-encompassing net, set to encourage community participation, nurture elite athletes, establish Hong Kong as an international event center, build professional pathways, and foster a sports industry ecosystem.
A decade long period from 2012 to 2024 saw the HKSAR government inject HK$13 billion ($1.66 billion) into the Elite Athletes Development Fund, mainly for backing the Hong Kong Sports Institute — the city’s leading promoter of elite sports training. The government’s annual funding to the HKSI had jumped by 58 percent in six years — from HK$596.2 million in 2018-19 to HK$941.6 million in 2024-25.
However, for niche sports, the support should be more laser-like focused.
To establish themselves at the community level — staking out their recreational, educational edges — offers a more viable launchpad than chasing elite ambitions like pro athletes or global events, says Kennedy Lai, founder of the China Hong Kong Newly Emerged Sports Association.
While the association’s chiefs unanimously praise the HKSAR’s generous sports funding — “borderline indulgent”, as some call it — they conceded that resources predominantly irrigate essential elite-level efforts, such as athletes’ overseas competition subsidies and hosting events, leaving grassroots popularization parched.
The ripple effect spans 49 EVSS-backed sports, including many of the globally niche disciplines, plus the over 20 “newest of them all” now targeting Hong Kong as their ideal breeding ground, according to Lai.
“Thanks to historical ties and early Western encounters, Hong Kong people are highly receptive to diverse influences. Even those with possibly the most obscure cultural elements, for example, Mölkky, a Finnish skittle game, find initial acceptance here,” he says.
On the sport’s recent status boost to Tier B, Michael Chow, chairman of the Hong Kong, China Waterski Association, pledged that, with expanded funding, the association is now in a better position to plan for more proactive community outreach.
The high-yield frontier for the grassroots included wider school partnerships to deliver training equipment and courses in a bid for broader youth engagement — a front, Chow says, had been previously restricted to a limited scope.
An extra budget would mean training of a higher quantity and quality, accessible to all — seasoned surfers and new dabblers alike — says David Chong, the HKCWA’s honorary secretary.
He acknowledges the sport’s immense financial barriers. Self-funding is out of the reach of many, he points out, citing that the average wake boat is worth HK$2 million, with the most high-end models exceeding 4 million yuan ($556,000).
Chong, who through his coastal upbringing has known many talented individuals since young — mostly fishermen’s sons and daughters — highlights the significance of more government support, also on the grounds of equity. “It benefits those who could excel, but lack the entry wealth.”
Potential for growth
Associations see the grassroots, primarily via youth sports engagement, as a frontier where government assistance can yield disproportionate returns for niche sports’ growth.
One of the Pro-Active Orienteering Club’s key undertakings is to organize regular training courses under the Leisure and Cultural Services Department-subvented Young Athletes Training Scheme, with the aim of discovering a fresh breed of potential star athletes through progressive training.
As part of broader efforts, the LCSD has also been jointly running the School Sports Program with the Education Bureau and sports associations since 2001, featuring play in demonstrations, easy sports skills training, as well as on-campus coaching support to encourage students’ sport participation.
Thus far, activities under the YATS and the SSP have covered 34 and 58 disciplines respectively, with many emerging sports, including mountain bike, diving and lawn bowls, enlisted alongside the traditional strong magnets like basketball, soccer and badminton.
In 2024, the LCSD launched the Subvention Scheme for New Sports, offering project-based grants of up to HK$200,000 for public new sports events. In May, the department started a series of citywide new sports fun days, running through November, featuring dodgeball, kin-ball, pickleball, and tchoukball.
However, amid the rush, Lai sounds a thoughtful note. The ad hoc, piecemeal injection of funds works when a sport is in its infancy.
For further growth, he believes Hong Kong needs a long-term development blueprint to outline systematic, continued support — a dedicated plan for niche sports to take root in the city.
Still, the hope of allocating greater public funds to niche sports faces challenges. For some, at a sport’s early buildup stage, associations must self-invest more, approach stakeholders on their own, and deliver notable results before asking for taxpayers’ money.
Vera Yuen Wing-han — a business lecturer at the University of Hong Kong — analyzes the rationale behind the HKSAR government’s decision to stop short of annulling the Olympic and Asian Games inclusions as funding benchmarks.
“The Olympic criterion matters not as an end, but as a measure of a sport’s soft power conversion effectiveness — whether it can elevate Hong Kong’s global stature and strengthen community belonging, social cohesion and national pride,” she says.
One can find examples in the skiing fever nationwide following Eileen Gu’s Olympic glory in 2022, and Hong Kong’s fencing trend, thanks to the gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, she notes.
While some niche sports boast growth potential in the city, thanks to their historical roots in Hong Kong or the city’s diverse, compact geography — from harbor fronts for surfing to mountain trails for orienteering, all connected by efficient transit networks — their case for more public funding remains weak, Yuen emphasizes.
At any rate, niche sports associations’ heads acknowledge her verdict, saying that, as a first step, they’ve been proactively looking for inroads into school playgrounds, with the best results coming when codriven by all fronts — associations, schools, as well as students and parents.
Earlier this year, the HKCWA welcomed its first-ever wakesurf school team, lauded by Chong as one of “the proudest achievements of the association in a long time”.
Wheels started to turn when Marcus Lau, a student at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong, snatched a second lead in the 2024 Nautique IWWF World Wakesurf Championships’ Grom Boys Skim category.
Lau approached the association for help with forming a school team along with his parents, followed by the association canvassing the school director’s support for the initiative. After one good trial course, it was a done deal.
Canvassing support for school teams is a recommended pathway, says Yuen.
What naturally follows is that such grassroots recognition will become the gold-plated bargaining chip for commercial partnerships, Yuen believes.
Only then can niche sports scale participation, build revenue streams and, ultimately, industrialize their escape from the minor leagues, and justify public money well spent, she says.
Linking with sponsors
In July, consulting firm Kearney published data that projected a bullish global sports market. Currently valued at $417 billion, it boasts a 5 percent average annual growth since 2020 and could reach $602 billion by 2030.
Nonetheless, a heavily business-backed model for niche sports remains elusive for now, with insiders skeptical of their commercial viability given limited media exposure and market size.
Studies have echoed the dampened sentiment, with many identifying niche sports’ weakness in wooing businesses due to sharper competition for audiences and consumers in an era of media fragmentation.
While noting that Hong Kong’s over 5,000 lawn bowl players prove “Asia’s top popularity”, Claudius Lam, acting president of Lawn Bowls Association of Hong Kong, China, laments it’s still “too small a market” for sponsors.
Many see Hong Kong’s competitive edge as a global financial center with a dense presence of marquee international brands — paired with its greatly incentivized mega-events hosting and major sports infrastructure development bids — giving niche sports favorable odds at soliciting private investment.
The World Snooker Grand Prix 2025 — a recognized “M” Mark major sports event with a record-breaking venue size at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Sports Park and total prize money of around HK$7.4 million — amounted to a private-public partnership triumph.
Although other sports have yet to mature a market and industry ecosystem as strong as billiards’, they have reported strong joint ventures.
Multiple major world-class championships and tournaments in orienteering, lawn bowls, and wave surfing have been held in the city, all partially enabled by commercial sponsorships.
Last year, Hong Kong secured the inaugural World Wakesurf Championships by the International Waterski and Wakeboard Federation, with local athlete Dawnee Kanjanapas claiming the open women’s championship.
On a local scale, the China Hong Kong Newly Emerged Sports Association’s Tencent-backed pickleball carnival set a Guinness World Record for mass participation, according to Lai.
He says niche sports leaders should strategically anchor their disciplines’ unique value, relevance, and particular brand alignment to convert their soft appeal into hard revenue.
Niche sports champions generally agree that they face an uphill battle, but they’ve nevertheless vowed to forge ahead, convinced it’s a venture that merits their unremitting lobbying for support.
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“A sport needs a visionary synergy, especially when it’s ‘new’, a synergy whereby government, businesses and society can collectively bet on tomorrow’s big league today,” says Lai.
Badminton took 140 years to inch from a niche pastime in mid-1800s India to the Olympic highlight at the 1992 Barcelona Games. It’s a path that today’s niche sports could well turn out to follow within three generations, he says.
“In sports, head starts become competitive edges; whoever outpaces, outperforms.”
Contact the writer at wanqing@chinadailyhk.com
