Alex Trelinski
EX-snooker player turned TV commentator, Willie Thorne, has been placed into an induced coma in a Spanish hospital after suffering from respiratory failure.
The 66-year-old Leicester-born star lives in a Villamartin apartment on the Orihuela Costa, and announced on social media in March that he was fighting leukaemia for which he was receiving treatment at Torrevieja Hospital.
Thorne worked on BBC TV’s snooker coverage for many years until the 2017-2018 season when he was dropped.
His peak as a player was in the mid-eighties when he reached number seven in the world rankings, at a time when Steve Davis dominated the sport.
Off the table, he had a well-documented addiction to gambling and admitted to racking up £1 million of debt, which led to his bankruptcy.
His carer, Julie O´Neill, launched a GoFundMe page to pay for Thorne´s leukaemia treatment, and as of this Tuesday (June 16), it had raised over £17,000.
In a message on the page, O´Neill said: “ We are all hoping that the treatments the hospital are giving him while in this induced coma will help to improve his overall condition and at some point enable him to breath on his own and be brought out of this coma.”
