Darts is a real sport

The end of the World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace is the end of the festive period for many sports fans. The tournament’s finals, nestled between Christmas Day and Epiphany, are now as synonymous with Christmas – or Dartsmas as Sky Sports likes to call it – as Wimbledon is with July. Pimms and strawberries swapped for lager and kebabs. Nearly four million people watched the darts final on the telly, closing in on the Wimbledon men’s final viewership.

It’s hard to see today’s darts tournaments, with the thousands of inebriated fans clad in fancy dress, the fireworks, the cheerleaders, and acknowledge it as the same as the struggling sport of the late 1980s. After a golden decade under the old British Darts Organisation’s (BDO) championships – some eight million had watched the televised final in 1979 – interest was stagnating, TV viewership was dropping, and the professionalisation of the sports was reversing.