Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Twenty months after he was banned from the sport, Zhao Xintong returns to professional snooker tomorrow. In 2021, he surged into the world’s top 16 players following his surprise win in the UK Championship, one of snooker’s biggest tournaments. But as we reported in Spotted: snooker’s fight against match-fixing, he was one of ten Chinese players ensnared in a match-fixing scandal which brought his career to a halt. Having served the shortest time of any of the ten, Zhao will play snooker once more. But it won’t be the World Snooker Tour’s (WST) English Open, underway in Essex. Zhao’s ranking has plummeted, putting all WST events out of reach. To return, he’ll have to place highly in a number of qualifying events on the Q Tour. The first event he’s eligible to play in starts tomorrow in a glorified sports hall in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, with a maximum prize of just £3,000 – a far cry from the £386,350 he won in 2021-22.
Further listening: Spotted: snooker’s fight against match fixing
