They’re always finding stuff here. Every time the trustees of Alexandra Palace undertake some renovation work on the 151-year-old building, they discover artefacts from the venue’s past: a kind of people’s history in detritus. Usually it’s just rusty coins and ticket stubs. But then there was the time they found perfectly preserved vials of early prototype tetanus vaccine embedded in a wall, a relic from when the place was a first world war hospital. Or a bit of Victorian era graffiti from a disgruntled tradesman, reading: “The wages of sin is death, the wages of a carpenter is worse.”
What will they find of today, decades hence, in the palace’s dusty niches and beneath its rotting floorboards? What will the archivists of the future make of the crumpled nun’s wimple, the faded receipt for a halloumi pitta pocket (only £12.50 at 2024 prices), the multiple small plastic sachets containing traces of mysterious white powdery residue? What stories will they tell of us, here, now?
Probably not – if we’re being totally honest – the story of how Thibault Tricole overcame Joe Comito in the opening game of the night before succumbing to the defending champion, Luke Humphries, in round two. Or Keane Barry upsetting Kim Huybrechts, or Jermaine Wattimena continuing his sparkling 2024 with a fine win over Stefan Bellmont.
Not that any of this was unimportant or trivial. Humphries looked fine, in case you’re wondering, at least when he wasn’t wandering into the single five. But in a curious inversion of the normal dynamics of big-time sport, there are times when what happens on the stage feels entirely transient. It is everything else – the palace, and its people – that will endure.
So to the 2025 Professional Darts Corporation world championships, a raising of the curtain that now also feels like a kind of cultural rite, the only sporting event that also serves as a reminder that you haven’t started your Christmas shopping yet. Up the hill they puff in their padded costumes and stretchy coloured fabric, pilgrims on the piss, songs of praise and songs of plunder, and also a song about Yaya Touré. Who’s playing? Ah, some French bloke.
Tricole looked a pale shadow of the player who knocked Gerwyn Price out of the Players Championship Finals last month: wilting a little under the lights as Humphries blew him away with a barely functional average of 91. Instead, it was his first opponent, Comito from Perth, who even in a 3-1 defeat stole the hearts of the crowd on his Ally Pally debut. A 40-hour round trip for one game of darts. Don’t listen to anybody who calls this a pub pastime.
Wattimena, the European Championship finalist, averaged close to 100 in his whitewash of Bellmont. But perhaps the performance of the night belonged to the 22-year-old Barry from County Meath in Ireland, who averaged 95 in his 3-1 win over a wayward Huybrechts. In his sensible glasses and straggly beard, Barry looks less like a professional darts player and more like an undercover PhD student researching professional darts players for his final thesis. But there’s talent to burn, and if he can beat Price on Monday will be in line for the biggest payday of his career.
The wages of sin is death; the wages of a world championship darts player is £7,500 for a single night’s work, rising to a potential £500,000. Money runs this sport now: all 90,000 tickets for this event sold out in 15 minutes this summer, and Barry Hearn reckons the PDC could fill this venue three times over. And so, for all the tradition and affection wrapped up in darts at the Palace, you wonder whether this is a marriage on borrowed time.
Officially, the PDC are adamant they’re not going anywhere for now. Unofficially, they’re definitely thinking about it. The Saudi exodus is still some way off, but London’s ExCeL and Olympia are both on the table. Of course, this is what any self-respecting capitalist does when demand outstrips supply. Darts did not get rich out of caution.
But, equally, some venues just fit. From Victorian pigeon racing to 21st-century drone racing, from suffragette meetings to same-sex marriage ceremonies, from darting superheroes to guys dressed as superheroes, this has always been a place where ordinary people come to grasp at extraordinary dreams. Up the hill they puff, getting their Palace fix while it’s still available, busily treading today’s quick thrill into tomorrow’s fine dust.
