A few days beyond her 80th birthday Dr Veronica Chan Yiu-kam MBE is a maelstrom - a storm of energy, passion and bloody-minded change-the-world determination that would shame a teenager. She is also the reason why the Women's World Cup kicked off this morning (Hong Kong time) with the strongest raft of Asian teams ever assembled.
'We call her the mother of Asian women's football,' declared Peter Velappan, the general secretary of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and one of the few people on the continent whose involvement stretches almost as far back as Chan's. 'She was so influential and dynamic. She's dedicated her life to Hong Kong football and to women's football. Her passion for football has never wavered.'
That dedication has its roots in an infancy that began in Hong Kong in the early 1920s when Chan was bitten by the bug. 'When I was a kid I always played with my six brothers - never with my sisters. I loved football. I didn't like dolls,' she stated, as if that alone was enough to explain a lifetime spent investing every cent, every minute of time and every ounce of energy in the sport. 'All my brothers were keen footballers and very famous when they were young,' she added with pride.
A marriage to Dr Bertcham Chiu But-york, who died in 1998, united two families of property - 'he was land, we were housing' - combining a husband and wife team with enough enthusiasm and wealth to make a difference. In the 1960s they were backing a string of First Division sides in the Hong Kong league including Rangers, Caroline Hill and the 1968 Senior Shield winning Yuen Long side, when Malaysia asked her to create a women's team. After training for 20 days Hong Kong's first ladies national team made their bow, losing three matches in a week to the visiting Malaysians (6-0, 1-0, 1-0 for the statistic freaks).
By 1965 Chan had formed the Hong Kong Ladies Football Association, in 1968 she was in at ground level when the Asian Ladies Football Confederation came into existence. A year later she was president and would remain at the helm for the next 33 years, overseeing its amalgamation into the AFC in 1986, until she stepped down as chairperson of the women's committee last year.
During that time she spent a fortune, literally, creating and funding the Asian Women's Championship, hosting the first tournament in Hong Kong in 1975 and three others, and bankrolling every edition until 1991 out of her own pocket. 'It cost me about $30 million at least. The whole world knows me for this. I think I'm a crazy woman,' she said, shaking her head and smiling. 'I can't understand how I've done it. Crazy, crazy, an old woman like me.'