Darts in 50: Equipment rules

The post-Taylor game belongs first to Michael van Gerwen, who won three world titles and set the highest televised average in history at 123.40, and then to a spread of champions from outside England: Gary Anderson and Peter Wright of Scotland, Gerwyn Price of Wales, with Belgium's Dimitri Van den Bergh and Germany's Gabriel Clemens reaching majors. Prize money climbed steeply under Barry Hearn and his successors, the Development Tour and the Challenge Tour created a genuine ladder, and the PDC pushed abroad with World Series events in Australia, New Zealand, North America, Bahrain and Asia. The BDO, starved of television money and reduced to a fraction of its former prize fund, went into liquidation in 2020; the WDF now runs the amateur world. Two developments define the 2020s. The first is the women's game, given real structure by the PDC Women's Series, guaranteed World Championship places and the emergence of Beau Greaves alongside the trail cut by Fallon Sherrock in 2019. The second is Luke Littler, who reached the world final at 16 in January 2024 and won it at 17 a year later, drawing record audiences and pulling a wave of teenagers into a sport that had spent fifty years being played mostly by men in their forties. Keep Darts with “Equipment rules” and 50 from 50. Darts has been rescued twice by the same thing that nearly killed it: its refusal to pretend to be anything other than a pub game. When broadcasters abandoned it in 1988 the sport looked terminal, and when the players walked out in 1992 it looked suicidal. What survived both was the format itself — a target that never changes, an opponent you cannot touch, and a running total that leaves no place to hide. Everything modern about the sport, from the arena lighting to the sports psychologists to the teenage world champion, sits on top of a game that a drinker from a Leeds pub in 1908 would recognise instantly, and would still be able to score.