while the oldest champion was Ric Flair, who won the championship at Unforgiven in 2005 at the age of 56. There have been 10 vacancies throughout the title's history. Gunther is the current champion in his first reign. He defeated Ricochet on the June 10, 2022 episode of SmackDown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Reception The Intercontinental Championship's early years have been praised. Samuel Kendall of Comic Book Resources lauded the championship during this era, stating: "It was a foregone conclusion that the Intercontinental Champion was the workhorse of the company and the next in line for the World Heavyweight Championship." Steve Cook of 411Mania wrote that "nearly anybody that was a big deal in WWE held the championship at some point." Steve Austin said he considered the Intercontinental Championship to be as important as the world titles and he remains in possession of the physical belt that represented the championship during his reign because of its historical importance. In the 2010s, WWE was criticized for its booking of the Intercontinental Champions. Chris Jericho said that WWE promoter Vince McMahon told him that "nobody fucking cares about the Intercontinental Championship" after he asked to be placed in a match for the title at WrestleMania 29 in 2013. Also in 2013, Darren Gutteridge of Pro Wrestling Dot Net wrote that the "title has proven an albatross for the past decade, with almost all title holders doomed to tread water, usually only beating people decisively when the title is on the line". The albatross metaphor was also used to describe the title in 2014 by James Caldwell of Pro Wrestling Torch, while Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer said that year that "the [Intercontinental] title isn't booked to mean much." Various commentators in 2014 and 2015, including from The Baltimore Sun, Rolling Stone, PWInsider, and Pro Wrestling Dot Net have pointed out that the Intercontinental Champion often loses non-title matches, while Mike Tedesco of Wrestleview questioned how Intercontinental Champions losing too much is supposed to bring prestige to the title. The championship continued to receive criticism into the 2020s. Kendall panned the recent reigns as forgettable and wrote that the title had "turned into a prop to be lugged around, rather than a title that should bestow prestige." Cook wrote that it had been "treated as something of an afterthought" for the previous two decades. The championship was only defended on two pay-per-views