Deta Hedman reached three BDO world finals and lost all three by a single set. Then, at 66 and five years after the BDO had gone, she won a world title at the WDF World Championship.
In between sits one of the longest careers the women’s game has produced: world number one in the mid-1990s, two retirements, a televised first against a man on the PDC side, and more than a decade at the BDO Women’s World Championship, where she kept reaching the late stages and kept finishing one set short.
St Thomas to Witham
Hedman was born in St Thomas, Jamaica, on 14 November 1959. Her parents emigrated to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s and left their children with relatives, and Hedman spent her childhood with an aunt in Castleton, in a shack without running water or electricity. She went to school from Monday to Thursday and worked on the farm on Fridays.
Her parents settled in Witham, Essex, and brought the children over in stages. Hedman joined them in January 1973. She started playing darts with her older brother after babysitting for him, then in the local pub in Witham and further afield in Essex. At 25 she joined a super league, was picked for the county, and from 1987 she was playing BDO events.
Darts runs in the family. Her brother Al won the BDO British Open in 1995, and another brother, Rudi, played professional football for Colchester United and Crystal Palace.
World Number One, Then Gone
Her first major final came at the 1990 Women’s World Masters, which she lost to Rhian Speed. In 1994 she won it, beating the defending champion Mandy Solomons, and she was ranked women’s world number one from 1994 to 1997. When she retired in 1997 because of work commitments, she was still at the top of the ranking.
She came back in 2002 on the PDC side. At the 2005 UK Open she beat Aaron Turner and Norman Fletcher before losing to Wayne Atwood in the last 64, and the win over Turner was the first time a woman had beaten a man in a televised major. In 2007 she stepped away again for work, and in 2009 she returned to the BDO.
Lakeside: the Nearly Years
That return season was full of titles, and it took her to Lakeside for the first time in 2010. She beat Irina Armstrong 2–0 in the quarter-finals and lost 2–0 to Trina Gulliver in the semi-final. In 2011 she beat Patricia De Peuter and lost the semi-final 2–0 to Rhian Edwards.
The finals followed, and each of them slipped by the narrowest margin:
- 2012: after beating Edwards and Lorraine Farlam, she led Anastasia Dobromyslova by a set in the final and threw for the championship, but was broken and lost 2–1.
- 2014: in a season in which she won 14 titles, she led Lisa Ashton 2–0 in sets and 2–1 in legs, threw for the title again, and lost 3–2 with a checkout percentage over 75.
- 2016: she lost 3–2 to Gulliver, who won her tenth world title that night.
In 2013, ranked number one for the championship, she went out 2–0 to Ashton. All three finals are in the women’s table on the BDO world champions page, each with Hedman in the finalist’s column.
After the BDO
She won the World Masters for a second time in 2013. In 2020 she tried PDC Qualifying School without winning a tour card, and later that year the PDC ran its first Women’s Series. Hedman finished level with Fallon Sherrock on the Order of Merit and took the World Championship place on legs won, 85 to 83. At the 2021 PDC World Championship she lost 3–1 to Andy Boulton in the first round. The BBC included her in its list of 100 Women in November 2020.
A World Title at the WDF Championship
The WDF World Championship took over at Lakeside after the BDO’s collapse, and Hedman kept entering. She reached the second round in 2022, the quarter-finals in 2023 and the semi-finals in 2024. At the 2025 edition she played in her fourth women’s world final and won it, beating Lerena Rietbergen 4–1.
In June 2025 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Birthday Honours, for services to darts and charity.
