Last year, Zhao came through four rounds of qualifying and then defeated 2024 runner-up Jak Jones, compatriot Lei Peifan and England’s Chris Wakelin before thrashing seven-time world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan 17-7 to reach the final.<\/p>\n
Zhao’s 18-12 success over Mark Williams was a pivotal moment in the sport, instantly making the winner a national hero, and inspiring youngsters to take up snooker.<\/p>\n
According to World Snooker Tour figures, more than 24.5 million unique viewers watched the third session of the final alone in China and during the whole 2025 tournament, it had a cumulative audience of 180 million on national broadcaster CCTV5.<\/p>\n
The event also had 1.5 billion social media impressions in China over its 17 days.<\/p>\n
“When I go to China I’m famous now and when I’m walking around the street lots of people want to take pictures of me,” said 29-year-old Zhao. “It’s amazing and a big difference to before but I’m really happy to do it and I’m trying to becoming a great player.<\/p>\n
“Before, older people would want to take pictures of me because they are snooker fans, but now it is their son or daughter that takes pictures – and I’m really happy for it.”<\/p>\n
If Zhao is to retain his title, he has to do something none of the previous 20 first-time winners at the Crucible have done, by winning it again the following year.<\/p>\n
But Zhao showed no signs of falling to the so-called ‘Crucible Curse’ in his first-round match, as he saw off English qualifier Liam Highfield 10-7.<\/p>\n
Before the tournament started, seven-time winner Stephen Hendry, speaking on BBC Television, said Zhao was his favourite to lift the trophy on Monday, 4 May.<\/p>\n
“I think Xintong can retain his title,” said Hendry. “He is the future of the game for the next 10-15 years \u2013 he is going to dominate, no-one scores like him.<\/p>\n
“He is not paying any attention to this stupid ‘curse’. Other Chinese players have got a huge lift from seeing their countryman lift the trophy.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, Zhao came through four rounds of qualifying and then defeated 2024 runner-up Jak Jones, compatriot Lei…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-414431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}