Rhian Edwards played in the women’s final at Lakeside in each of her first two appearances, in 2010 and 2011, and lost both to Trina Gulliver without taking a set.
That is where most accounts of her BDO years stop. The rest of the story is longer: a Welsh county player who worked as a nursery nurse, beat Deta Hedman on the way to one of those finals, set a checkout record the following year, and more than a decade later, playing as Rhian O’Sullivan, won a major on the WDF circuit.
Swansea, Llanelli and the Welsh Leagues
Edwards was born in Swansea on 20 January 1981 and is based in Llanelli. She has played since 1999, and her darts came up through the Welsh system: Glamorgan at county level, the Glamorgan Super-League, the Kidwelly League and the Red Lion team in Llandyfaelog.
Before her first world championship she had won the Dyfed Open women’s singles five times and the Glamorgan Open women’s singles, reached the semi-finals of the Welsh Classic, and been part of the Wales short squad in 2009. She was a quarter-finalist at the Women’s World Masters in 2009. Later she won the Turkish Open, in 2010 and again in 2012.
Throughout, she has not been a full-time professional. She works as a childcare nursery nurse.
2010: A Final at the First Attempt
Edwards qualified for the BDO Women’s World Championship for the first time in 2010. In the quarter-finals she beat fellow Welshwoman Julie Gore 2–0, and in the semi-finals she beat Karen Lawman 2–0. The final was a different proposition. Gulliver beat her 2–0 and took her eighth world title.
2011: Past Hedman, Stopped by Gulliver Again
A year later she did it again. She beat Gore once more in the quarter-finals and then beat Deta Hedman 2–0 in the semi-finals. The final ended the same way as the first: Gulliver won 2–0 for her ninth title.
Both years her opponent was the most successful player in the history of the women’s championship, and both finals are in the women’s table on the BDO world champions page.
2012: A Record in Defeat
In 2012 the draw put her against Hedman, the top seed, in the first round. Hedman won 2–1 and went on to the final. Edwards left with something of her own: a 155 checkout, the highest recorded in the history of the women’s world finals at that point. It stood until 2014.
Rhian O’Sullivan
She stayed with the BDO until it folded in 2020 and now plays as Rhian O’Sullivan, née Edwards, on both the WDF circuit and, from 2021, the PDC side. The nickname is “The Swan”, and she walks on to “Yma o Hyd”.
The WDF World Championship brought her back to Frimley Green, and back to the late stages. She reached the semi-finals in 2022, losing 3–2 to Kirsty Hutchinson, and again in 2023, after beating Hedman 2–0 in the quarter-finals, when Beau Greaves beat her 3–0. In 2024 she went out in the second round to Lerena Rietbergen, and in 2025 Rietbergen beat her again, 3–2 in the semi-finals.
The titles have kept coming around those runs. She won the Spanish Open and the England National Singles in 2022, the Swiss Open, the Denmark Masters, the Irish Classic and a PDC Women’s Series event in 2023, the MODUS Super Series in 2024, and the Las Vegas Classic in 2025. In 2023 she played the Women’s World Matchplay for the first time and lost 4–3 to Robyn Byrne in the quarter-finals. In 2024 she was runner-up at the WDF World Masters.
Her first WDF ranking major came at the 2025 Dutch Open, fifteen years after her first Lakeside final.
