A demonstration event will be staged in Paris next year to "showcase the Olympic values" of the sport following a launch staged within the Eiffel Tower on November 30 last year.

Paris 2024 is due to submit recommendations for new sports during the first half of this year.

Snooker, campaigning under the wider banner of "billiard sports", is seeking o make an impression on a list of contenders likely to include baseball and softball, karate, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing - all included on the Tokyo 2020 programme - and squash, girding itself once again having bid unsuccessfully for inclusion in the last three Olympics. 

The two bodies carrying the billiard sports banner - the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) and the World Snooker Federation (WSF) - are busy highlighting how more people around the world are now having the opportunity to play. 

They are stressing that this includes female people - a detail likely to be carefully noted in an era when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is moving towards gender equality in its showpiece event.

Jason Ferguson, President of the WSF and chairman of the WPBSA, said after the Paris presentation: "With the levels of participation in our great sport consistently increasing and new opportunities being created by the WSF and its partners for people across the globe to be able to pick up a cue, the sport has never been in a stronger position to take its rightful place on the Olympic programme."

The WPBSA, for its part, claimed it was in "a significantly stronger position" as the sport continued to grow, adding some lip-smacking stats for IOC consumption as it estimated the "television reach" of the World Snooker Tour at 1.6 billion homes.

Snooker staged mixed competition, increasingly encouraged by the IOC among Olympic sports in recent years, at the 2017 World Games held in the Polish city of Wrocław, and in March last year the WSF staged its inaugural mixed World Championships in Malta, shortly after hosting the Women's World Championships at the same venue.

The WSF Championships offered four places at the World Snooker Championships qualification rounds for the semi-finalists.

Both finalists - China's teenage winner Luo Honghao and Poland's Adam Stefanów - also received a place on the World Snooker Tour for the 2018-2019 season.

Meanwhile, the question of if and when a woman player will break through to make a significant impact on the World Snooker Tour remains tantalisingly open.

It is a question that has been posed more than once.   

In 1989 I visited the grandly-named Phoenix Ballroom at Pontin's holiday resort in St Mary's Bay, Brixham, where the then 21-year-old Allison Fisher won the fourth of her seven women's world titles.

For all her recent success, she had no sponsor. And she was operating in a climate where the possibilities of women breaking through to the highest levels of the sport were being flatly ruled out by leading male players such as six-times world champion and now BBC pundit Steve Davis, and Australia's Eddie Charlton, runner-up in the 1975 world final.

 "It is not women's bodies that are the problem," Davis said. "It is their minds."

Charlton, however, maintained that it was women's bodies that were the problem, opining shortly before Fisher's Brixham win: "You need a lot of physical strength to stand steady on your shot during long sessions. I don't think women should be in too much of a hurry to play in with the men. 

"They're going to find it tough."

Fisher's response? "A lot of these men have not even seen us play recently. I think it is a realistic possibility that a woman will join the tournament professionals within five years."

Five years later she became that woman as she was invited to play in the Matchroom Snooker League.

But despite defeating leading male players such as Neal Foulds, Tony Drago and Mike Hallett, she herself referred to her matches as being part of "a warm-up act for the Matchroom League".

More than 20 years on, the player who has most recently carried the banner for the women's game, 11-times world champion Reanne Evans, is preparing for her latest high profile match-up against a top class male player.

Evans has been given a wildcard for next month's Snooker Shoot Out and was drawn to play Jimmy "Whirlwind" White, six-times a World Championship runner-up between 1984 and 1994.

The 33-year-old from Dudley is one of two women, along with fellow World Women's Tour player Emma Parker, invited for the first time among eight wildcards for the 128-strong televised ranking event.

The event takes place at the Watford Colosseum from February 21 to 24 and will be broadcast by Eurosport.

Evans was just two wins from becoming the first woman to play at Sheffield's Crucible in the 2017 World Championship.

Despite being a 10-1 underdog, she defeated Finland's Robin Hull 10-8 in the first round of qualifying before losing out 10-6 to former world quarter-finalist Lee Walker.

Two years earlier, Evans had lost a tight opening match in the World Championship qualifying event, 10-8 to 1997 world champion Ken Doherty.

"If I had lost, I would have felt even more gutted than a couple of years ago against Ken," she told reporters after her victory over Hull. "When it went 8-8, I thought, 'oh no, not again'. But I stuck in well."

Evans' successor as world champion, Hong Kong's Ng On Yee, also played in the 2017 World Championship qualifying event, losing her first match against Nigel Bond 10-1.

Yee also took part in the 2017 World Games, losing 3-2 to Michael Judge of Ireland, who went out in the next round to the eventual winner, Kyren Wilson of Britain. Belgium's Wendy Jans lost her first round match against Declan Brennan 3-1.

Asked this week by BBC Sport if a female player could qualify for the World Championship at the Crucible in the next few years, Evans responded in a fashion which, oddly enough, exactly paralleled the position taken up by Davis during his glory years.

"There's no physical reason why it can't be done, but mentally we are built a bit differently," she said.

"It's going to be the first woman that can find consistency. As soon as a player does that, then why not?"

Women's world number three Rebecca Kenna, who was a semi-finalist in last year's WSF Women's World Championships and subsequently won a match against a male opponent in the mixed competition, was articulate on the continuing possibility of a female breakthrough.

"A woman can do every shot that a man can do and can make a century break, so I see no reason why she could not go to the elite level and play professionally," she told insidethegames. 

"It's not physically impossible, it's possible. To get someone to that level, you need to get them at a young age and get the right people around them, just the same as any lad.

"I see no physical limitations, there are male pros on tour who don't have as much power as others. 

"I think a woman can do every shot that a man can do. It's just practice and I feel like had I practised for 20 years then I would have been an even stronger player.

"I felt on a level with the men when competing with them this week. They were all close matches that could have gone either way and with this experience I will come back next year with a bit more belief that I can compete and win now.

"I think that men and women have an equal chance. It has got to be in your brain, in your genes, you have got to be that sporty type. If you get into it, start potting balls and get the bug, I don't think it matters if you are a boy or a girl.

"It's definitely a good thing that women can compete on the main tour with the men. I don't think that we should get any special treatment to get onto the tour, but we have the same opportunities as men to qualify such as through Q School or mixed gender events like the WSF Championship."

Fisher, whose official career earnings in snooker did not reach £15,000 ($19,500/€17,200), tapped into six figure sums in the late 1990s as she became one of the most effective players - male or female - on the US pool circuit.

But the latest rising female talents in the game are likely to find a little more support from the organising bodies keen to keep them within the sport and, perhaps, to help in the larger campaign to change the minds of those in charge of the Olympics…