There was a final flick of the fingers, before the fists began to pump and soar, and the tears started to flow across 17-year-old Luke Littler’s face. No wonder. The most famous teenager in the UK had just become the youngest world champion in darts history.
Over the past 13 months, Littler has repeatedly defied the rules of sporting gravity, rising from an unknown 16-year-old ranked 164 to its star attraction. Now, incredibly, he is also the PDC world champion after a thumping 7-3 victory of the three-time former winner Michael Van Gerwen, which also earned him a £500,000 (€602,000) cheque.
It was supposed to be a contest. It was nearly a rout. Before the start, the bookmakers’ odds implied that Littler had about a 70 per cent chance of winning. But the teenager’s performance made a mockery of that as he raced to a 4-0 lead before nursing his advantage to the finish.
“Wow, wow, wow!” he silently mouthed to himself afterwards. But this victory was the culmination of a 16-year-old journey that began when Littler’s dad bought him a magnetic board from a pound shop when he was just 18 months old.
Within a year, Littler jnr was throwing darts at a board barely above the ground before crying out “180”. And by the time he was 11, he was so good that his dad told him to hang up his football boots and focus on darts. It has proved to be a wise choice.
The power of the Littler Effect was such that seats near the stage were on sale for £700 each on the secondary ticket market hours before the final. And even those far back in bleachers were going for more than £300. On one of the coldest nights of the winter, Littler was again proving the hottest of attractions.
Certainly there are few better sights in sport more impressive than Littler in full flow: the dart finding the 8mm-wide treble 20 bed with dazzling regularity, those doubles hit with the certainty of Job.
But he was helped by a nervous start by van Gerwen, who was playing in his seventh world final. The Dutchman had big-game experience coming out of his nostrils. But even the greats can go wobbly when Littler is hunting them down. That much was evident in the opening leg. Van Gerwen started well and looked in control, only to bust his score by hitting double 16 instead of double eight. Two more missed doubles followed, and Littler pounced.
Littler not only sensed blood, he relished the feeling. He took the first set in a blink of an eye. Then the second. Before long it was 4-0 and the match was as good as over. Van Gerwen briefly stemmed the bleeding with a bullseye to win set five, and held his throw to win set seven and nine. But he was only delaying the inevitable.
To further rub salt into van Gerwen’s wounds, Littler also took his record of being the youngest player to win the PDC title by seven years. And for good measure, the teenager is also now one of the youngest-ever British world champions in a mainstream sport.
The skateboarder Sky Brown was 14 and the diver Tom Daley 15 when they first ruled the world in 2023 and 2009. While the snowboarder Mia Brookes and figure skater Cecilia Colledge were 16 when they won world titles in 2023 and 1937. But Littler, at 17 years and 347 days, is not far behind. And given his talent, who knows how many more world titles he will win?
Of course there will be some that will insist that darts isn’t a sport, just like they did when it first gatecrashed the mainstream more than 40 years ago. Those same sceptics will also scoff at Littler’s well-known penchant for kebabs. But no sport, surely, subjects a player’s nervous system to such unremitting scrutiny. Barely a minute or two goes by without the need to hit the width of an 8mm double to win a leg, set, match, or even a world title.
Yet once again Littler took it in his stride as he finished with a dazzling three-dart average of 102.73, with a 56 per cent success rate on his doubles. And the really scary thing? This is just the start. – Guardian
