Vichai Raksriaksorn was born on 4 April 1958 in Bangkok, into a Thai-Chinese family. In 1989 he opened a single duty-free shop in the city — nothing that looked, at the time, like the start of an empire. It became King Power.
King Power grew into Thailand's largest duty-free retail operator, eventually holding the exclusive rights to run duty-free shops at the country's major airports. The scale of it caught royal attention: in a ceremony with King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Vichai was given a new surname for his family — Srivaddhanaprabha, meaning "light of progressive glory." He'd built the business under one name and would finish his life under another, awarded to him because of what that business had become.
Bookmakers opened the 2015–16 Premier League season with Leicester City at 5,000-to-1 to win the title — the kind of odds normally reserved as a joke, not a real market price. Leicester won it anyway. It was the club's first top-flight title in its entire 132-year history, and it happened at odds so long that people who'd placed novelty bets years earlier, for a few pounds, walked away with life-changing money. The press called Leicester the "Cinderella Team." Nobody in football had seen anything quite like it before, and most people who study the sport still haven't seen anything like it since.
Vichai gifted all nineteen first-team players BMW i8 sports cars, worth roughly £100,000 each, as a personal reward for the title. It wasn't a boardroom bonus buried in a press release — it was the kind of gesture that made clear this had never just been business to him.
After a Premier League match against West Ham at King Power Stadium, Vichai boarded his helicopter to leave, as he regularly did. It crashed in a car park just outside the stadium minutes later. He died along with four others on board, at 60 years old.
His son Aiyawatt — known as "Top" — took over as chairman, continuing the vision his father had started less than a decade earlier. Leicester City commissioned a statue of Vichai for the grounds outside King Power Stadium, the stadium named for the business he'd built from one shop in Bangkok, standing near the spot where his story ended.
Sources: Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, Forbes, Goodreturns — facts cross-checked across multiple accounts, not taken from a single source.
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