AOB: Darts of Pleasure

There are plenty of sports that, in this blogs view, don’t really belong in the Olympics. Synchronised swimming, ice dancing, and in fact anything else where a panel of judges pick the winner should be struck from the competition forthwith.

Top of our list to replace any of these would be Darts. While one may question the validity of a ‘sport’ where you can become world champion despite weighing over 30 stone and knocking back 25 bottles of beer a day (hello Andy ‘The Viking’ Fordham, more of whom later), we challenge anyone to watch a top Darts match and not become a fan.

At the moment, terrestrial TV viewers can catch a rare glimpse of the PDC pool of players in the Grand Slam of Darts, which is being screened on ITV. For those not in the know, Darts players have been split in two (not literally, although some of them are so big that they could probably get away with it) since the early 90’s – those affiliated to the British Darts Organisation (BDO) compete for one world championship (screened on the BBC), and those signed up to the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) do battle in another (on Sky).

The grand slam was meant to bring everyone together to find out who is top of the tree, but in reality it is mostly PDC players with a few BDO’ers tagged on. Nevertheless, it has been an interesting tournament so far, and with the knock out stages getting underway tonight the action at the oche should be cranked up a notch. 13 time world champion Phil 'the Power' Taylor, and current champ Raymond van Barneveld are the bookies favourites, although this blog tips another Dutchman, Roland Scholten (pictured), for glory.

A number of factors combine to make darts magic: There are the players themselves, who give hope to fat blokes everywhere that a career as a professional sportsman is still not quite out of reach. There are the, ahem, interesting wives and girlfriends (DWAGS?), who are always referred to by commentators Sid Waddell and Tony Green as ‘lovely’, even if they are in fact a tattooed horror from Rotherham. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the tension that Darts creates. As far as this blog is concerned there is no other sport where success and failure are so finely balanced. A player can be seemingly cruising to victory, only for one missed double or a big check out from the opponent to completely turn the match on its head. This element of total unpredictability makes Darts one of the most compelling spectator sports around.

So yeah, watch the end of the Grand Slam, get hooked, then start counting the days until the World Championships in January. Fordham, now 10 stone lighter after having 18 litres of fluid drained from his lungs, is planning a comeback….