Four world titles in eight years. Not bad for a man whose first visit ended without him taking a set.
Raymond van Barneveld arrived at the 1991 BDO World Championship an anonymous Dutchman and left almost immediately, beaten 3–0 in the first round by Keith Sullivan. Nothing about that result suggested what was coming. By the time he departed for good in 2006 he had won the title in 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2005, contested two further finals, and turned the world championship at Lakeside into something close to a personal possession.
The apprenticeship
Born in The Hague on 20 April 1967, van Barneveld took up competitive darts in 1984, at seventeen, and won the Rotterdam Open in that same first year. The talent was never the question. What took longer was everything around it — the temperament, the patience, the business of winning long televised matches against men who had been grinding through them for decades.
The 1991 first-round exit stung, but it bought him something useful: a look at the place. Lakeside is not a venue that rewards tourists. The stage is close, the crowd is closer, and the format — long sets, long nights — finds out anyone whose game has a soft spot in it. Van Barneveld went away and removed the soft spots.
It came together in 1995, when he reached his first world final. Waiting for him there was Richie Burnett, and the Welshman won it 6–3. A first final lost usually gets filed under useful experience. Van Barneveld filed it under unfinished business.
Two finals, two 6–5s
The 1998 final gave him Burnett again, and this time it went the full distance. Van Barneveld won 6–5, three years of waiting settled by a single set. It stands as one of the tidier pieces of symmetry in the championship’s history: beaten by Burnett in his first final, champion against Burnett in his second.
A year later he did it again, by exactly the same margin. Ronnie Baxter took him all the way in the 1999 final and lost, 6–5. Two world titles, back to back, both decided in the last set of the last night. Other champions have won more emphatically. Very few have been harder to beat when the whole year came down to one leg of darts.
Those two finals defined what kind of player he was. Not a steamroller, not a showman — a closer. The man who, when the arithmetic got tight and the crowd got loud, kept hitting the shot in front of him.
The widening empire
Through the early 2000s the winning spread well beyond one week in January. Alongside the world titles came a spread of the biggest prizes the BDO circuit had to offer:
- Winmau World Masters — 2001 and 2005
- World Darts Trophy — 2003 and 2004
- International Darts League — 2003, 2004 and 2006
The third world title arrived in 2003, a 6–3 win over Ritchie Davies that was his most comfortable final yet. By then van Barneveld was the man the tournament organised itself around: the champion everyone else measured themselves against, the name every draw was read for. For a stretch of about four years there was no sensible argument about who the best player in BDO darts was.
Fordham, then Adams
The 2004 semi-final is the defeat people still talk about. Van Barneveld, the defending champion, led Andy Fordham 3–0 in sets, then 4–2, and lost 5–4. Fordham went on to win the title, and the match went straight into Lakeside folklore — the greatest comeback the old ballroom ever staged, depending on which end of it you were standing.
What followed says plenty about van Barneveld. Plenty of champions have let a defeat like that rot the rest of a career. He returned in 2005 and won the lot, beating Martin Adams 6–2 in the final for a fourth title, and collected a second World Masters in the same year. At 37, on the evidence of that season, he was better than he had ever been.
The leaving of Lakeside
The 2006 final should have delivered a fifth title and put him level with Eric Bristow at the top of the all-time list. Instead a young countryman, Jelle Klaasen, beat him 7–5. The succession, when it came, came from his own country — which was its own kind of compliment. Dutch darts had not really existed as a force when van Barneveld lost to Keith Sullivan in 1991. Fifteen years later it was deep enough to produce the man who beat him.
On 15 February 2006, weeks after that defeat, van Barneveld announced he was leaving for the PDC. He wanted, he said, a greater challenge — and regular competition against Phil Taylor, the rival the sport’s divide had kept on the other side of the fence for a decade. Within a year he had his answer, beating Taylor 7–6 to win the 2007 PDC world title in a final that belongs in any argument about the greatest match ever thrown. But that is another code’s story, and it gets told often enough elsewhere.
The Lakeside ledger stands on its own terms: six finals in twelve years, four of them won, two of them by the last set available. A championship that had never heard of him in 1991 spent a decade learning to say his name — then shortened it, like everyone else, to Barney.
