You need to know these 5 dart stars: the sharpest characters and the most moving stories

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They certainly don’t look like model athletes. And yet the stars at the Darts World Cup surprise the audience year after year. At Alexandra Palace (“Ally Pally”) or at home in front of their screen, fans search for their favorites. One of the secrets besides the incredible accuracy of the small arrows: the flashy characters that compete against each other. Blick tells us which strange birds and moving fates are worth paying attention to during the 2024 World Cup.

He is one of the greatest legends the sport has ever seen. The Dutchman won the 2007 World Cup in an epic final against Phil Taylor, his eternal rival. The trained postman effectively retired after the 2020 World Cup (which took place in December 2019), but announced his retirement in September. But the motivation was not only his passion for darts, as he said to the “South Germans” before the start of the 2024 World Cup: “I don’t have to explain to you what happens financially in the event of a divorce. I had to find a way to earn money and that was: get my tour card back for the major darts tournaments.” In 2018 he divorced his wife Silvia, with whom he has three children. ‘Barney’ has remarried since September 2023, but his honeymoon with Julia Evans, 18 years her junior, had to be postponed due to the World Cup.

The Welshman is one of the biggest dominators of the darts scene. In 2021 he won the Ally Pally title, and now he is once again among the favorites for the crown. But the ex-rugby player, who fully embraced darts in 2014, is not popular with everyone. Because he celebrates his successes loudly and exaggeratedly, many supporters annoy him. It’s not unusual for him to be booed. “If it looks like it’s all going to roll away from me, I’ll hide it well,” he told the Guardian before the 2021 World Cup. “It’s difficult, especially when the family is watching. But I can’t think about it too much, I actually like playing with the audience.”

If one of the darts greats can be described as a bird of paradise, it is Wright. The 2020 world champion has been playing for years with a colorful mohawk and the snake’s head on his side – hence his nickname “Snakebite”. Blame it: his wife Joanne. She is a trained hairdresser and is responsible for her husband’s haircut. “Nine times out of ten, she decides what color we use,” Wright once explained. The procedure takes at least two hours before Wright is ready for his big performance.

Darts is gaining more and more momentum in Germany – and the German participants are now doing more than impressively. Florian Hempel is one of them. The former handball goalkeeper (a game in the 2nd Bundesliga) only started playing darts in 2017 and that too by accident. Colleagues threw darts at an “eight euro thing from Lidl or Aldi” in front of the exit. In 2024 he will be in the main field of the World Cup for the third time.

A lighter story is that of the Dutchman Dirk van Duijvenbode. He works on an eggplant farm and that’s how he got his nickname. They call him: “Aubergenius”, eggplant genius. His entrance ritual is definitely somewhere between genius and madness when he storms the stage before the duels to loud techno music and carries a real eggplant, which he proudly shows off.

Source : Blick