Treble-20. “Ohh, he couldn’t.” Treble-19. “Oh, you spiteful young man.” Bull. “You spiteful person! That is ridiculous!” As ever, Wayne Mardle – commentating on the World Matchplay final for Sky Sports on Sunday night – put it most succinctly of all.
The great individual champions require a vindictive streak. The ability not just to harness their own strength, but to tessellate it with their opponent’s moment of greatest vulnerability. To sense weakness, recognise doubt and pounce mercilessly upon it. To nurture and desire the very same qualities we try to extinguish and discourage in our children. To find a 167 checkout, when your opponent is sitting on double-10, in a major final.
To be fair to Luke Littler, he would probably have won whatever he did, however he threw his darts, whether he did it kindly or not. Such is the gulf he enjoys over what we so euphemistically describe as “his competition”. Gerwyn Price went into Sunday’s final playing perhaps the best darts of his life; arguably better than when he won the world championship in 2021. Of all the contenders to Littler’s crown, Price seems to have thought hardest about how to get into the teenager’s headspace, how not to be cowed, how to use the crowd and his own overwhelming self-belief to make himself the problem. Littler destroyed him 18-9 in just over an hour.
This was Littler’s second consecutive World Matchplay crown, to go with a second consecutive world championship in January and a second consecutive UK Open in March. There are 11 major competitions in the Professional Darts Corporation calendar and Littler has won six out of six this year, the past eight in a row, nine of the past 11. His order of merit tally of £3.1m is more than treble that of Luke Humphries in second place. A run of 36 wins in his past 37 matches in ranking tournaments stands comparison with the great Phil Taylor, who was throwing against lesser fields in a less professional era.
Like many members of his terminally online generation, Littler is preoccupied by numbers and records, the clout they earn you, the tears of his beaten adversaries. Which is part of what makes him such a fascinating character to watch in big tournaments: the sense that dominance is its own end, not simply the culmination of a well-executed process. It is why he produces his best darts on the biggest stages, in the longest formats. Why he is addicted to the rush of the 170, the nine-dart finish, the TV cameras, the crowds, whether they like him or not.
More than 800 miles away, on the slopes of Le Lioran, a similar phenomenon was unfolding. Yes, on an important level, I realise Littler and Tadej Pogacar are very different athletes: one the perfect physical specimen honed since an early age through a strict diet and a murderous training regime, the other a five-time winner of the Tour de France. But having watched a good deal of both over the past few weeks and indeed the past few years, I’ve been struck above all by the similarities, the common sensations, the curious paradox that arises when you see someone so good at what they do that people start to accuse them of ruining it for everyone else.
“It’s like watching two different sports,” the TNT Sports commentator gushed as Pogacar surged past Richard Carapaz on stage 10 on the way to stretching his lead over Jonas Vingegaard to an almost impregnable three minutes. This was the stage when the Bastille Day crowds began to boo Pogacar for the stranglehold he has begun to exert on the sport. “Haters gonna hate,” Pogacar said, and other riders would also spring to his defence. At the heart of all this lay a question: to what extent do we want to see dominant athletes dominate?
For Pogacar, these are questions loaded by road cycling’s toxic history. No matter how many doping tests he passes, no matter how much transparency he offers, there is a constituency of cycling fans for whom dominance will always equal suspicion. And – important – a suspicion that can never truly be refuted. You don’t trust the anti-doping protocols and you don’t truly believe the Tour can be won clean. In which case, how is anyone meant to exhibit transcendence? What is the point of a three-week sporting event in which nobody can ever truly be allowed to be exceptional? Why are you even watching this sport in the first place?
For Littler, by contrast, the fascination lies in the very absence of exegesis, the sheer inadequacy of the darting vocabulary to contextualise what it is he does. There are numbers and palmarès, of course, but really the Littler supremacy consists of a vibe, an implication, a terror, the sense he can win a game however he wants. He can destroy you in minutes or hours; from the front or coming from behind, with a smile or a snarl. The result may never be in contention, but virtually everything else is.
As with Pogacar, Littler’s dominance has drawn as much negative as positive comment in recent months, not so much in the form of personal criticism but a lament for an age when the sport was more capricious and open. Part of the moral panic is that they are still young – Pogacar 27, Littler 19, both still capable of shattering every record in the game, demoralising an entire generation of challengers.
Even the very greatest dominate only fleetingly. Eddy Merckx, perhaps Pogacar’s only remaining rival as the greatest cyclist of all time, won pretty much everything he won in an eight-year stretch from 1967 to 1975. Roger Federer’s imperial phase basically lasted for six years; Usain Bolt’s and Steffi Graf’s roughly eight. Even Taylor’s two decades of dominance require a little context: only from around 2005 onwards was darts a genuinely year-round sport.
The weekend before last, I went to the London Stadium to watch another seemingly invincible athlete do their thing. Mondo Duplantis had broken the men’s pole vault world record 13 times in four years and would inevitably break it again. Except, he didn’t. He got injured and had to make do with second place with a still-unfathomable height of 5.95m.
Far from feeling short-changed, I left feeling strangely melancholy, reminded that what felt inexorable at the time was not a new normal, but a brief anomaly. Perhaps we underestimate the ephemerality of true dominance, the extent to which it is not a permanent state of affairs, but a temporary aligning of the planets, the elusiveness of pure perfection.
Pogacar, Littler, Duplantis, Jannik Sinner, Barcelona Women, Australia Women: hate them if you must. But know too that it could all be gone tomorrow.
