Only four players have managed to defend the World Snooker Championship title at the Crucible Theatre.
That’s the level of exclusivity that reigning world champion Zhao Xintong is trying to emulate over the next 17 days in Sheffield.
Steve Davis did it. Stephen Hendry did it. Ronnie O’Sullivan did it. Mark Selby did it.
Four all-time greats who dominated their eras and conquered the sport’s most demanding stage in back-to-back campaigns.
Nobody else has managed a successful repeat since the tournament moved to Sheffield in 1977, and that context alone underlines the scale of the task facing the defending champion this year.
It’s why the so-called Curse of the Crucible refuses to go away. No first-time winner has ever returned to successfully defend the title, with all of the game’s biggest names falling short at their first attempt.
Zhao, however, isn’t arriving in Sheffield as just another defending champion hoping to buck the trend.
He comes into the 2026 edition in a rich vein of form, having dominated in recent months and through establishing himself as the standout player of the year so far.
After a relatively slow start to the 2025/26 campaign, the Cyclone from China found form at the Riyadh Season Snooker Championship invitational in November, beating Neil Robertson in the final.
Several months later he was clean sweeping the Players Series events – claiming a hat-trick of ranking titles at the World Grand Prix, the Players Championship, and the Tour Championship.
That he has produced those moments of victory while not necessarily always playing at his brilliant best is what makes his 2026 Crucible bid so intriguing.
On paper, his title defence begins in relatively kind fashion. Zhao has been paired with the lowest-ranked qualifier Liam Highfield in the first-round draw, a match he will be strongly expected to win.
Yet the Crucible has a habit of quickly stripping away any sense of comfort.
The margins are fine, the pressure is relentless, and momentum can shift in an instant.
A potential second-round meeting with Ding Junhui, who many thought would be China’s first world champion before Zhao rewrote the script a year ago, would immediately raise the stakes.
Several other dangerous names lie in wait including a possible quarter-final bout with Shaun Murphy. Robertson, Ronnie O’Sullivan, and John Higgins each also lurk in the top half of the draw.
History is uncompromising with only four players having ever gone back-to-back at the Crucible, but there is no sense of him clinging on or trying to rediscover last year’s form.
If anything, he looks stronger now – more complete, more confident, and more accustomed to winning on the biggest stages.
If the Curse of the Crucible is ever going to be broken, it feels like it will take a player performing at exactly this level, and maybe a few of the right stars to align along the way.
Whether all that proves to be enough is another question entirely.
But if top seed Zhao Xintong does go all the way again, it won’t just represent a successful title defence.
It would place him alongside Davis, Hendry, O’Sullivan, and Selby in one of the most exclusive groups the sport has ever known.
And it would finally lay one of snooker’s most enduring narratives – that pesky curse – to rest.
Featured photo credit: WST
