Winning, losing, I was basically going through the motions

Two-time world champion Adrian Lewis explains how he fell out of love with darts but hints at a full-time return

- Jonathan Liew

"The thing with darts," explains Adrian Lewis, "is you have to be in a happy place. It was for me, anyway. When you're up, everything's free, everything's flowing. You don't feel like you've got a burden on yourself."

And when Lewis was free, when the darts flowed from his hand like water, when the 180s piled up around his ears, the man they called "Jackpot" could make this unfathomably difficult sport look like the simplest thing in the world. "Don't think, just throw," was his mantra. "Just get up there, get into a rhythm, bash-bash-bash."

Those two back-to-back world championships in 2011 and 2012, aged just 25 and 26, remain the jewel in the crown. The first of those against Gary Anderson featured Lewis hitting the first nine-dart finish in a world final. His Grand Slam semi-final against his mentor Phil Taylor, in which Lewis averaged 111 and lost, is still one of the greatest matches played.

His golden era probably only lasted for a few years - from around 2010 to 2014 - but hot streaks have rarely run hotter. Last week the world champion Luke Littler was asked to name the four faces he would put on a Mount Rushmore of darts. He chose Taylor, Michael van Gerwen, Raymond van Barneveld and Lewis: a player whose body of work barely registers against the other three, perhaps the only member of that quartet who could walk down the street unrecognised. But if you know, you know.

So what became of a player often described - until the arrival of Littler - as the most naturally gifted darting practitioner ever seen? It happened slowly at first, and then all at once. At the start of 2016, when he reached his last world final, Lewis was still one of the biggest names in the sport. By 2021 he was out of the world's top 32, forced back on to the treadmill of qualification tournaments and small floor events. Eventually, around the start of 2023, he stopped turning up altogether.