British Darts Organisation

The British Darts Organisation, known as the BDO, was a darts organisation founded on 7 January 1973 by Olly Croft and dissolved in 2020 under the stewardship of Des Jacklin. Made up of 66 member counties, it oversaw professional, semi-professional and amateur darts competitions in Britain, and it was a founder member of the World Darts Federation in 1974. It gradually superseded the National Darts Association of Great Britain, which had been the de facto governing body of darts in the United Kingdom since 1954, and it set the rules of the game, including the distance of the throwing oche and the dimensions of the board. It staged a World Professional Darts Championship from 1978 to 2020, known for 26 years as The Embassy and later as the Lakeside championship. In the early 1990s a dispute over television coverage and sponsorship led the leading players to break away and form the body that became the Professional Darts Corporation, and the BDO went into liquidation in September 2020.