This week, I climbed up a long and steep hill in North London to get to the Alexandra Palace for a session of the World Darts Championships (actually, I did it twice).
Halfway up, I came upon a group making the same trek, including a bloke insisting to his companions that darts isn’t a sport at all but rather a mere pub skill.
Luke Littler celebrates victory over Stephen Bunting in the World Darts Championship.Credit: AP
Which brings me to breakdancing (or, as it is now to be called, breaking). If darts is a skill and not a sport, then it is an abomination that breaking has somehow convinced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that it should be an Olympic sport.
I’m well aware that breaking’s inclusion at the Paris Olympics was the choice of the organisers of the 2024 Games, and a strategic play by the IOC to appeal to younger audiences.
And I understand the IOC’s idea of tapping into the minds of Millennials. After all, one of the stated objectives of the committee is to ensure the Olympic programme innovates and adapts to modern tastes and new trends.
And finally, yes, I recognise that having breaking as an Olympic sport seems less odd when we consider the events that featured in 1900 at Paris’s first Olympics, where live pigeon shooting and pigeon racing featured (though presumably not at the same time), as did the tug o’ war. In 1912 in Stockholm, an Olympic art competition was introduced that featured for many Olympiads thereafter.
Illustration: Simon Letch Credit:
I get all that. But, regardless, the best thing I can say about breaking is that while it was an Olympic sport last year, it won’t be ever again.
You can debate ad infinitum whether it’s a sport, a skill or something else but, in truth, it doesn’t really matter any more.
That’s because, thankfully, breaking’s Olympic future is as bleak as that long-since-forgotten discipline of distance plunging – an aquatic activity better described as competitive floating, which appeared on the programme in 1904. It, too, thankfully disappeared.
Breaking doesn’t feature on the program for Los Angeles 2028, and it won’t be revived for Brisbane four years after that.
Which isn’t for a second to say the IOC shouldn’t innovate; it must or the Olympic movement will die.
The Olympics must be compelling, electrifying and unparalleled. If the IOC can’t achieve all of these things constantly, it’s dead.
Stephen Bunting takes a selfie with a fan at Alexandra Palace.Credit: AP
Which brings me to this fork in the road. If you’re reading this over breakfast at 8am on Saturday, January 4, here’s a hot tip … GET UP AND SWITCH ON THE DARTS! Today is the final of the same World Darts Championships I attended a few days ago. The first world champion for 2025, across all sports, will be crowned this morning (technically yesterday evening, in a dreadfully bleak and freezing North London).
If breaking as an Olympic sport is now a thing of the past, this week I have seen the future. If breaking could get a start at Paris 2024, why can’t darts be considered as a future Olympic sport? If climbing can get in, why not darts? It seems inevitable that esports will eventually be given a place. So, again, why not darts?
If it was included on the Olympic programme, darts would surely be the most sought-after ticket in Los Angeles in three years’ time – especially if Snoop Dogg MC’d the show. Put it on in the LA Forum or the Greek Theatre even, and chuck in a thousand laser beams. I.N.S.A.N.E.
For darts isn’t just a sport for rotund white men. These world championships have seen 96 players in the main draw, including men, a woman and even a transgender athlete. Athletes representing 28 different nations; universality that would be the envy of many Olympic disciplines.
Any sport, distilled down to its elements, is basic. The essence of the sport (or skill?) of darts: spearing postage-stamp-sized targets from almost 2.5 metres away.
That doesn’t necessarily sound like the most scintillating entertainment, yet I sat in a crowd this week in London and saw Australian Damon Heta throw a “nine-darter” – a perfect leg, darting nirvana and an achievement beyond some of the greatest players throughout an entire career – and I promise you I’ve never seen a sporting crowd erupt like the one that day at the Alexandra Palace.
I was at the “good end” of Sydney’s Olympic Stadium in November 2005, when John Aloisi scored the penalty to qualify the Socceroos for the 2006 World Cup, and it’s the only comparison I can think of.
To my mind, darts encapsulates what so many other sports either can’t be or never were. The world of professional darts understands exactly what it is, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
Modern-day elite sport can be sterile and inaccessible. Darts is the antithesis: crescendoing inflexion points in competition, compelling anxiety, and accessibility.
If shooting is an Olympic sport, and if breaking was, darts should at least be considered. Yet one suspects there’s more chance of Raygun becoming a two-time Olympian.
The IOC doesn’t recognise an international federation for darts and I don’t think it ever has. There isn’t even a single international body governing the sport. One of the bodies that runs darts is actually a signatory to the World Anti-Doping Code, but the reality is that not all darts players are subject to any such rules.
Moreover, darts likely isn’t practised in a broad enough spread of countries, across enough of the continents, to qualify for IOC recognition by its universality standards.
The sport is run more by boxing-promoter types than international and national federations, which means the systems for the sport’s growth are all tied to profit.
Anyway, according to some at least, darts itself isn’t a sport at all but is rather a skill honed in the dingy backrooms of North London pubs, especially in the freezing weeks after Christmas.
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