"Flo Hempel once collapsed next to a dartboard" - Gabriel Clemens recalls bizarre ProTour incident

Anyone who regularly plays league, tournament, or ranking darts knows the feeling all too well: the match is lost – but the real punishment only comes afterward. Grab the marker or chalk, step up to the scoreboard, and mark the next match. Ironically, it’s right there, standing motionless next to the oche, that the strangest stories often unfold.

The latest episode of the podcast “Darts auf die 1” showed that “marking” isn’t just a topic for hobby and pub players. Freshly crowned Pro Tour champion Gabriel Clemens, two-time World Championship entrant Robert Marijanovic, and Bundesliga player Marcel Althaus traded anecdotes – and Clemens recalled a scene with Florian Hempel that none of those present are likely to forget anytime soon.

It all started with a tongue-in-cheek question from Althaus. "Have you ever seen a dartboard come loose on the tour? That would be hilarious – it would make such a loud bang in the hall."

Clemens hasn’t seen a board fall off yet – but he did witness another unusual incident. "No, but Flo Hempel once collapsed next to a dartboard. It was in Niedernhausen. He was marking – we were doing the scoring ourselves back then during Covid. His circulation just gave way for a moment and he completely hit the floor. But he recovered pretty quickly."

Althaus didn’t miss the opening. "Hopefully he carried on marking afterwards," he joked afterwards.

Althaus then explained in more detail that scoring beside the board has its pitfalls. "I can relate to that a bit – I think everyone knows the feeling. When you're marking, you've got far too much time to think about everything. Sometimes I even start thinking that I could faint. It's never happened, but in 90 per cent of cases you've just lost your match, so you're already in a bad mood. Then it might be really hot, you've just finished playing and now you have to stand there perfectly still like a tin soldier. It's pretty uncomfortable."

Clemens also knows the little difficulties that come with marking. "What happens to me sometimes is that I don't properly notice the first two darts a player throws, so by the third dart I have to quickly work out the score. Then I'm always scrambling a bit."

Marijanovic added with a wink: "Then, at a normal tournament, you also end up marking two players averaging 55 against each other – and of course it goes all nine legs in a first-to-five match."

Even that wasn’t enough for Althaus. "Fifty-five? That would be world class. I've marked 27 average against 26 average before. Best of three. Forty-five minutes. I was genuinely worried about my body," he joked.

To wrap up, Marijanovic had his own solution ready: "I'd just deliberately write the scores down wrong a few times until they decide they want someone else to do the marking."