Iran aims for improbable bullseye in darts

Stuart Williams
AFP

September 28, 2006

TEHRAN -- The players are clean-living and models of athleticism. A world away from the game's heartland in a smoky corner of a British pub, darts has taken off with a bang in Iran.

In a country where alcohol is strictly forbidden, do not expect pints of beer flowing nearby or players to sport the paunches that are the proud mark of many kings of the tungsten arrows in northern Europe.

And do not dare suggest that darts is anything other than a serious sport. In Iran, dart /italic} is a healthy pursuit for both men and women that is also good for families and can even do its bit to help foster world peace.

Flushed with success at a recent Asian championships in Malaysia, the head of Iranian darts proudly relates how his association has grown to boast an extraordinary 600,000 members after just two years in existence.

"When we went to the world darts federation meeting in Australia and said we had this many people taking part everyone laughed at us. They could not believe it," smiled Massoud Zohouri. "We look at darts as a sport. It's played in prisons, the civil service and factories. The parliament speaker, even the clerics are playing," he said, showing off pictures of a cleric tentatively trying his arm. Dart boards have even been installed in mosques.

He said that thousands attended introductory training sessions 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) high at a cable car station in the Alborz Mountains above the capital this summer. Maybe the first high altitude training camp in the game's history.

Young, sporty, and fiercely focused on their chosen sport, the Islamic republic's six-strong national team of two women and four men certainly explode preconceptions about darts.

Dressed in the compulsory Islamic headscarf and a knee-length mantoh coat modestly adorned with the stripes of the national colors of Iran, Sahar Zohouri, 20, is Iran's top female player.

She shows off her class - which took her to a silver medal earlier this month at the Asia Pacific Cup women's singles in Kuala Lumpur - by elegantly planting three darts around triple 19 with ruthless ease.

"When I started playing darts I wanted to be the best in Iran. Then I wanted to become one of the best in Asia. Now I'm thinking about the world and I want a top three in the world championships," she said. "It's a thought game. Your head has to be clear of every idea. When your head is clear you concentrate well. I hit the maximum often in training. In competition, with all the pressure, it becomes much harder."

Massoud Zohouri laughs off the suggestion that Iranian players could be ill-equipped to cope with the lion's den of raucous noise and pressure that is generated in the big championships in Britain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

"Look, we have an Iranian league and without the alcohol the noise exists, too! Don't think that there is no noise because there is no alcohol."

"At the championships in Malaysia there were tables full of alcohol. But we are spreading the game without alcohol and as such we can become a role model," for the rest of the darts world, he said.

Iran's number one men's player, Nima Ghisasvand, a 17-year-old who knocked out a world-ranked New Zealand thrower in the first round in Kuala Lumpur, vows that "I will increase my training until I become world champion."

He marks out as his hero the English multiple world champion Phil "The Power" Taylor, who rose in a matter of years from being a bathroom fitting maker to the richest and most successful sportsman in the history of darts.

And the ambitions of the Iranian darts association, from its modest headquarters in an apartment in central Tehran, do not just stop at sporting success.

It has spread darts in schools and universities, encouraged the disabled to take up the sport, and organized a darts Olympiad for children that aroused plaudits from the United Nations.

Stepping into more political territory, the darts association and postal service earlier this year joined forces to issue stamps showing a darts board and a nuclear reactor bearing the slogan "peaceful nuclear technology is the absolute right for Iran."

Zohouri said that he believed that all such initiatives are within the spirit of darts, saying that the sport can bring people around the world together irrespective of their background.

"Families of different cultures can get together and play it without distinction according to religion, language, or race. And that is the Olympic spirit."

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