You only have to look at the most successful darts player of all time to know that athletic prowess isn’t a prerequisite for success in the sport.

We’re talking about Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor, the rather portly man who retired at the start of this year as the greatest darts player of all time.

I can excuse you not knowing what Taylor looks like, so here’s a picture of the chap who turned a pub sport into a global phenomenon:

Doesn’t scream ‘athlete’, but fair play to him.

Phil Taylor might have hung up his darts, but over the weekend the world’s premier players gathered in Wolverhampton, England, for the final stretch of a huge international tournament called the Grand Slam of Darts.

First price would bring the winner around $140 000 in prize money, so the competition was fierce, and the tension clearly got to Gary Anderson (pictured right up the top) and Wesley Harms, who were involved in a shoot-out for a quarter-final spot.

Anderson beat Harms, but it was the accusations after the match that left a bad taste in the mouth. Here’s VICE:

Harms blamed his loss (in part) on a “fragrant smell,” which he claimed came from his opponent repeatedly letting out some rancid stinkers.

“It’ll take me two nights to lose this smell from my nose,” Harms told RTL7L, a Dutch TV station.

But when an interviewer confronted Anderson about allegedly passing gas during the match, he turned the accusation right back around on Harms. He, too, had smelled the offending odor, an unbearable stench of “eggs, rotten eggs”—but he said he was “1,010 percent” confident that Harms had done the deed, not him.

As far as post-match interviews go, they don’t get much stranger than the one Anderson gave. Remember, this is a professional sportsman:

Now we haven’t coined ‘Fartgate’ ourselves, and the term is now being used everywhere. Seriously, look at these pun-heavy headlines:

We’ll keep it classy with the BBC:

When a sport is rocked by “fartgate”, the only thing the person in charge can do is laugh.

“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” joked Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) chairman Barry Hearn…

Hearn told BBC Sport the Darts Regulation Authority had the power to fine or suspend players guilty of gamesmanship or a lack of professionalism.

It has been pointed out on social media that the deep-voiced caller Russ Bray also shared the stage with the players.

“I guess people wonder if blowing off might constitute advanced gamesmanship. Then again, Russ was just about within farting distance,” said Hearn.

“Something doesn’t smell right. There is nothing worse than a silent fart. This could run and run.”

For what it’s worth, Bray has “categorically denied” being the culprit.

I must say, I do like this Hearn chap:

“On a slightly more serious note, this is a top-level competition involving highly skilled sportsmen – so we have no intention of renaming the event the ‘Grand Slam of Farts’ as some have suggested,” added Hearn.

Bloody marvellous, Barry. Quite incredibly, this isn’t the first time he has had to deal with a fart-related incident:

Snooker player Bill Werbeniuk [pictured below necking a pint in the middle of a match] caused a stir when he had a bout of flatulence during a World Championship match at the Crucible in Sheffield.

“It was the most enormous noise, but what happened next was genius comic timing,” recalled Hearn, who is also chairman of World Snooker.

Canadian Werbeniuk turned round to an elderly woman in the crowd and said: “Was that you?”

Seems like snooker crowds are serial offenders, because there’s also this from the 2013 World Snooker Championship, when Judd Trump was distracted by an odd sound during his semi-final with Ronnie O’Sullivan:

OK, that’s quite enough fart-related news for one day.

As you were.

[source:vice&bbc]