This is a new one.
Let’s get the cards on the table – never has any of us ever come across an accusation of farting to gain an advantage in sport. Never. But there is a first time for everything.
Gamesmanship takes many forms, it seems.
In football, there’s shirt-pulling, simulation, a wall edging forward to defend a free kick. That sort of thing.
In cricket, sportsmanship is sacrosanct, but there is always room for sledging: hammering away in the batsman’s ear to put him off his shot.
And in darts?
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There’s all sorts you can do to get an advantage but Gary Anderson and Wesley Harms have had to deny accusations of farting to intentionally leave off-putting ‘rotten egg smells’.
Two-time Scottish world champion Anderson, 47, won Friday’s Grand Slam match 10-2 to progress to the quarter-finals, but Dutchman Harms, 34, was quick to explain his sub-par performance by accusing Anderson of leaving a “fragrant smell”.
He told Dutch TV station RTL7L: “It’ll take me two nights to lose this smell from my nose.”
Anderson reacted as if he had been accused of war crimes.
“If the boy thinks I’ve farted he’s 1010% wrong. I swear on my children’s lives that it was not my fault,” he said.
“I had a bad stomach once on stage before and admitted it. So I’m not going to lie about farting on stage.
“Every time I walked past there was a waft of rotten eggs so that’s why I was thinking it was him.
“It was bad. It was a stink, then he started to play better and I thought he must have needed to get some wind out.
“If somebody has done that they need to see a doctor. Seemingly he says it was me but I would admit it.”
We may never get to the bottom of this mystery, but one thing is for certain: never accuse Gary Anderson of farting unless you have concrete evidence. He doesn’t take kindly to it.
