Zhao Xintong: China's controversial snooker champion

The "long-overdue" moment of an Asian player winning the World Snooker Championship for the first time "was supposed to be one of unalloyed joy", said Luke Baker in The Independent. But there is an "air of hesitancy around the celebrations".

China's Zhao Xintong "cut a swathe through qualifying and the main stage" in Sheffield to set up a final against Mark Williams, the Welshman "gunning for his fourth Crucible title". But Williams "proved no match" for the 28-year-old, who ended with 18 frames to 12 on Monday in "comfortable fashion", becoming the first Asian player to pocket the £500,000 in prize money. "So far, so fairytale."

But Zhao, nicknamed The Cyclone, was only competing as an amateur because he'd recently returned from a 20-month ban for his involvement in snooker's biggest match-fixing scandal, making him the "most complicated" champion in the sport's history.

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Snooker's 'dark side'

It is "surprising" that Zhao is China's first world snooker champion, said The i Paper. The game arrived in China in the 1980s, taking off after it became part of the Asian Games in 1998, but now the country boasts about 300,000 snooker clubs. Out of the last 32 players at this year's World Championship, a "record" 10 were Chinese.

During the Covid pandemic, Ding Junhui (the first Chinese player to become world no. 1, in 2014) set up a snooker academy – a "kind of finishing school" – in South Yorkshire. Nearby Sheffield, home of the World Championship, became an "outpost of Chinese snooker". And that was where and when "snooker's dark side took hold".

In early 2023, 10 Chinese players were charged with varying degrees of match-fixing. Many were under significant financial pressure from travelling abroad to compete in tournaments, as well as "ill-judged gambling and betting habits", according to the independent report. Unable to return home due to the pandemic, they had become "lonely and isolated". "Established players Liang Wenbo and Li Hang capitalised on their vulnerability", said The i Paper. Those two were banned for life for their part in the "biggest scandal in the sport's history".

Zhao was the most high-profile player involved, having won the "prestigious" UK Championship in 2021 and reaching No. 9 in world rankings. But the report painted him as a "victim of sorts". He alone among the 10 did not personally fix any matches, but accepted charges of being party to another player fixing two matches, and betting on matches himself. He was "not a ringleader"; he felt he had "no other option".

'The game's missed him'

Zhao was given a 30-month suspension, reduced to 20 months after an early admission and guilty plea. He was forced to start from scratch as an amateur, playing qualifying school tournaments to earn a tour card.

"Two years ago I made a little mistake, now I've come back," Zhao told the BBC's Jamie Broughton in November last year. "I've practised every day. I knew I would come back so I need to keep confident in myself."

He apologised publicly, "bemoaning his own stupidity and pledged to come back to the game – in the backwaters of the amateur ranks – a better man", said The Times. Since he returned in September, he has won 47 of his 49 matches, and as a qualifier his journey to the world title was "longer than any other player in Crucible history", taking in nine rounds and 172 frames. "There can be little doubt that he has earned it."

Zhao rejoins the professional circuit next season as world no. 11 – but he is technically still banned from playing in China until July, as his sentence there wasn't reduced. It will "make for an awkward piece of small print to gloss over when he flies back to his homeland" today.

Although an estimated 150 million people in China watched the final, it still "remains to be seen" whether Zhao will be "lauded as a national hero", said the Daily Mail. But Ronnie O'Sullivan, arguably the greatest living player – who Zhao demolished in the semi-finals – remains one of his "staunchest supporters".

"The game's missed him," said O'Sullivan. Zhao's win "will just be amazing for snooker, and his life as well".