Professional Dart World Rocked by Allegations of Heinous Farts

Late last week, some of the greatest players in the strange, enduringly popular world of professional darts converged on Wolverhampton, England, for the final stretch of a huge international tournament: the Grand Slam of Darts. The stakes were high—whoever won would walk away with about $140,000 in prize money—so it was a pretty big deal when one player accused his rival of an atrocious, potentially game-altering offense: ripping a bunch of God-awful farts.

According to the Guardian, after Gary Anderson beat Wesley Harms 10-2 on Thursday for a spot in the quarter-finals, 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 RTL7, 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.

"You can put your finger up my arse, there'll be no smell there," Anderson told RTL7. "I thought he had shit, and I went, That's dirty. It was bad. It was a stink. I thought it was him, and he started playing better, I went, He must have needed to get some wind out."

The foul-smelling saga has now spiraled into a full blown fecal fiasco, a controversy the British media promptly dubbed "fartgate." Both players insist they never ripped ass, but Anderson claims he has proof it couldn't have been him: As he made painfully, explicitly clear in a previous interview, when he farts during a game of darts, it's typically… uh, worse than just a fart.

"Usually if I fart on stage I shit myself," Anderson told RTL7. "If I had farted and it smelled like that, I'd put my hands up and go, 'Sorry.'"

Anderson somehow had even more to say about the whole derriere-fueled debacle, telling RTL7 that "every time [Harms] walked past there was a waft of rotten eggs." It's a convincing story, sure, in line with the whole "he who smelt it, dealt it" school of thought—and yet something about it doesn't smell right. If he's innocent, why would Anderson go to such extreme lengths to describe the fart in question—why paint its alleged origins and bouquet in such painstaking, stomach-turning detail? And why would Harms even bring it up if it was he, in fact, who played the butt trumpet during their match?

It's not our place to say who's telling the truth here, though it is worth noting that Anderson went on to lose in the finals. A simple biff, or karmic retribution? We'll let you be the judge.

Correction (11/20): This article mistakenly identified the Dutch TV station RTL7 as "RTL7L." The post has been updated to correct the error.

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