Darts player in KC just biked across America. He won’t let his dreams die

Darts player Jules van Dongen’s professional career ended just as it was starting.

After losing his hospitality job during the pandemic in 2021, the Netherlands native who now lives in Parkville committed to turning his longtime hobby of playing darts into a career.

After two years of winning titles on the U.S. circuit, van Dongen, who earned the moniker “The Dutch Dragon,” attended the Professional Darts Corporation’s Q-School event in 2022 and earned a two-year professional tour card, highlighted by competing at the 2024 PDC World Championships.

After briefly losing his pro status in 2024, van Dongen returned to Q-School and regained his pro card, despite battling hand issues that prevented him from being able to grip his darts.

“Initially, I thought it was a grip issue,” van Dongen said. “I twist the dart onto my thumb before I throw it, and I couldn’t twist it anymore. My thumb basically wouldn’t cooperate.”

Van Dongen’s injury lingered for the next two years. Some of his peers believed he was suffering from dartitis, a psychological condition similar to the yips. With his fledgling career in limbo, van Dongen simply wanted answers.

“I went to an orthopedic specialist, got physical therapy, acupuncture and hypnotherapy,” van Dongen said. “I worked with a sports psychologist. I did nerve studies and MRIs, just nothing seemed to help. And I didn’t get any answers.

A late night of online research eventually gave van Dongen the diagnosis that he was looking for: task-specific dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes muscle spasms during specific tasks. In van Dongen’s case, the pinching motion required to hold a dart would trigger the spasms.

An appointment with a neurologist quickly confirmed the diagnosis and the fact there is not yet an easy cure — though there are some treatments that can help.

“Acceptance was the hardest part,” he said. “I felt my career was on the rise. All of a sudden, the rug gets pulled out from underneath you.”

Finding a new passion

The dystonia diagnosis forced van Dongen to find a new passion after his 10-year darts journey abruptly ended.

“Once I knew my career was over, I just fell into this gap of: What am I going to do with my life?” he said. “I needed something. I needed a purpose. I needed a goal.”

Van Dongen’s new purpose centered around his old hobby of cycling, something he did avidly as a way to stay in shape through months spent in bars and darts halls.

His love for cycling led him to complete three Ironman races over the years and laid the foundation for a new goal: to bike across the country, starting in Santa Monica, California, and ending over 3,000 miles away in Yorktown, Virginia.

Van Dongen said the idea came to him in a flash on a Monday. The next day, he brought the idea to his wife.

“She said, ‘You’re crazy. It’s not happening,’” van Dongen said with a laugh. “The next day she said, ‘OK, what do we need to do? What do you need? What are your expectations? How are we going to do this?’ She was on board fairly quickly.”

What started as a thought quickly turned into a passion project to raise awareness for dystonia. The cause became known as “Pedals and Points,” with van Dongen partnering his bicycle journey across the country with his love for darts.

Along his route, van Dongen planned to stop at darts venues to play games with local spectators while chronicling his journey on Instagram with plans of making a documentary.

“I noticed that sharing everything I went through helped a lot of people,” van Dongen said. “I just wanted to give people an idea of how big (dystonia) is and how many people it affects.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, dystonia affects close to 300,000 people in the United States in different forms.

Inside his cross-country trip

After weeks of planning and training, van Dongen, his cameraman and his driver packed into an RV and drove to Santa Monica to begin his journey. Very quickly, the Dutchman realized how difficult the mission would be.

“The first day went well, but then Days 2, 3 and 4, a lot went wrong,” van Dongen said. “My GPS would say, ‘Go left here,’ and it would go straight into the bushes. And I was like, ‘I’m in over my head here.’”

Most of van Dongen’s memories of his 3,000-mile bicycle ride were of the difficulties he faced along the way. In California, he biked through gravel paths into the mountains to avoid road closures. In New Mexico, he spent hundreds of miles on the interstate with semi-trucks flying past him and spent days in eastern Kentucky fending off wild dogs on his bike with pepper spray.

The trip took 76 days, with van Dongen splitting time between hours on his bike and cramming into an RV in parks and towns around the country. He did his best to conserve a limited supply of electricity and water while battling lots of flat tires, 14 to be exact, a fact he commemorates with a tattoo after completing the journey.

The ending of van Dongen’s journey was decidedly anti-climactic. It was raining heavily when he crossed his finish line in Yorktown with little fanfare, as his family was sheltered in their cars due to the weather.

A single news reporter approached him for a picture and a question so brief van Dongen didn’t remember it. He was left alone again with his bike. He took one ceremonial picture, dipping his bike into the Atlantic Ocean before departing back home the next day.

It’s as they say: It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

That journey helped van Dongen reaffirm his love for darts. After four years on the pro circuit, his pit stops to play with local dart players in Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia allowed van Dongen to enjoy the sport that he had dedicated the last decade of his life to without worrying about winning or losing.

“I was always so hypercompetitive, and playing was my job. Then on this trip I played just for fun,” he said. “I definitely learned how to have fun again playing darts and not just have my mood be dictated by results.”

Van Dongen’s biggest takeaway from the trip was the selfless people he came across who helped him. He marveled at how many strangers were willing to refill his supplies, offer roadside assistance or simply point him in the right direction without a second thought.

“In the current day and age that we live in with politics and all that, you don’t notice any of that — when there’s just a lot of kindness and people want to help you when you’re stranded on the side of the road,” he said. “No one’s going to ask me what you stand for, what you believe in. They just act out of the kindness of the heart.”

Continuing to grow awareness​

Two days after concluding his coast-to-coast journey, van Dongen was back on his bike for his regular rides around the Parkville suburbs, preparing to tackle the next item on his growing list of goals.

He’s already thought of his next cycling challenge: biking 10,000 miles in 100 days. The idea came to him while he was riding across the country. He hasn’t proposed the idea to his family yet, but the plan is in the works.

Van Dongen is also attempting to return to the professional darts ranks as a left-handed player. His dystonia only affects his right hand, so van Dongen has been relearning the sport with his left, attempting to become the first professional darts player to throw with his right and left hand.

He’s nine months into his journey as a southpaw. He believes it will take him close to five years to achieve the success he had on his right side.

“You’re learning everything from scratch,” van Dongen said. “I think it would take years for it to really come to terms with my opposite hand because there’s literally nothing I could do with my opposite hand.”

There’s also his ever-present goal of bringing more attention to dystonia. van Dongen’s Pedals and Points campaign raised $14,500 for the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation.

“With dystonia, a lot of people still don’t understand. I mean, it took me a long time to understand what it actually was,” he said. “People don’t really know what they’re donating for, and I think that’s the challenge.”

Van Dongen is still doing his part, partnering with other athletes, singers and artists who have dystonia to continue to bring awareness to a condition that people don’t know they have. After he was diagnosed, he says he helped four of his peers get the help they needed for the same condition.

“I noticed for a lot of people the common theme was that everyone was misdiagnosed for a year, two years, even three years,” he said. “I hope through raising awareness that we can spread the word and get people on the right track.”

When van Dongen reflects on the last two years, he credits two things for keeping him motivated during the moments when his dreams seemed to crumble. Over the months, he has worked to reform them.

The first is his family and friends, starting with his wife, Linda, who balanced a full-time job with taking care of their two children while he chased his professional darts dreams overseas. Included in that group are his peers in the darts community who emotionally and financially supported him when it seemed his career was cut short.

“They financially supported me, and they backed me 100%,” van Dongen said. “It’s for people like that. I want to prove that I could still do it, and that’s my hope, left-handed.”

The second is his determination. The motivation that powered him to become one of the best darts players in the United States is the same feeling that motivates him now to reach the same heights with his left hand — and to bike across the country to show others that the condition that stalled his career wouldn’t stop anything else.

“I have to have something to strive for in life,” he said. “Things could be so much worse, even for me. It’s not nice, but I’m still healthy, and I’m still here.”