April 26, 2011
The VVV Venlo football club in Limburg has signed a symbolic professional contract of 10 years for this wee boy of 1.5 years who has a good shot. Sure, it’s a YouTube thing, but 900,000 people if not more around the world have seen this video and now you can too. The little boy, Baerke, even tried out on the field with a VVV Venlo midfielder and apparently the toddler’s grandfather used to play with this team way back.
(Link: telegraaf)
April 16, 2011
A program like Holland Sport is something you’ll never see on commercial television channels, which is what makes it a pity the publicly funded programme will stop after 8 successful years. Holland Sport was a show that mixed interviews of athletes with silly game elements, in which members of the audience got to pit their skills against the show’s guests.
Although the interviews were not as deep as they could have been (the show was, after all, intended as light entertainment), they did provide an alternative view into the lives of top athletes.
As an example of the sort of things a programme like Holland Sports could afford to do, here is a video poem Rob Hodselmans made for the show last week, covering the cobblestone-filled Paris – Roubaix bicycle road race.
Between 2003 and 2008 the show was hosted by presenter Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and comedian Wilfried de Jong. When Van Nieuwkerk quit due to other obligations, De Jong carried on solo for a couple of years.
(Video: YouTube / Rob Hodselmans)
Tags: cycling, Holland Sport, Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, Wilfried de Jong
April 14, 2011
Utrecht marathon bans foreign runners door tvnportal
On Monday 25 April, the city of Utrecht will hold its annual marathon, and the organisers have decided that non-Dutch participants are less worthy of winning this race as they’re simply too good and win too much. Sounds like something an elementary school teacher would say to the smart children not to hurt the stupid kids’ feelings.
Organisers are trying to discourage Kenyans in particular from taking part, saying only invited runners can win ‘big money’ prizes. Only Dutch nationals have been invited to take part.
If this isn’t discrimination, I don’t know what is. No other Dutch marathon does this.
(Link dutchnews.nl, Tip: Stefan)
Tags: discrimination, marathon, Utrecht
April 2, 2011
This football table by GRO, a collective of British designers in Eindhoven, takes 12 weeks to build and 48,500 euro to purchase. It’s called 11 The Game (or just ’11’), and you can see it in action at Vimeo.
(Photos: 11thegame.com. Link: Engadget.)
Tags: GRO, table football
March 30, 2011
Photographer Hans van der Meer wanted to express how football players feigning injuries all look alike:
The look of grown men on the football pitch often takes the form of little theatre pieces, lying down ‘injured’ being a remarkable sub-category of this art. […] The way we ‘died’ as children playing Cowboys and Indians is how we now see our heroes in the Champions League go down on TV. […] When somebody has actually been injured they usually keep pretty still.
To that effect Van der Meer took photographs of football players acting injured, and these photos now adorn the pitch of ASV Arsenal in Amsterdam, near the old Olympic Stadium. They are part of an art project for the club called Terreinwinst, involving 11 artists and which is still in the process of being finished.
I am a great admirer of Van der Meers earlier series of European and Dutch football pitches, in which the football field was shown in its sometimes adverse surroundings. The strength of his new work, Ten Ways to Lie Down Injured, is that it paves the way for amateur photographers to add context themselves. My tip: bring a telephoto lens, as the photos are all mounted across the field.
(Submitted by Nienke van Beers)
Tags: acting, Amsterdam, football, football players, Hans van der Meer
March 29, 2011
Yesterday, scuba diving club De Waterman in Oss, Brabant got 173 divers together to break the World Record Underwater Ironing. The former world record was held by a Polish scuba diving club with 130 divers. De Waterman said they worked really hard, right up to the last minute to find enough divers and enough ironing gear.
De Waterman can now proudly be included in the Guinness Book of Records just in time for the club’s 40th anniversary.
(Link: depers.nl, Photo Photo of Underwater ironing by BlueBeyond, some rights reserved)
Tags: Brabant, Guinness Book of Records, ironing, Oss, scuba diving
March 16, 2011
The Volkskrant estimated that the Netherlands would be allocated some 100,000 tickets for the Olympic Games in London 2012, but apparently they are only up for grabs if you’re a card carrying Dutch person.
Non-Dutch Europeans in the Netherlands who want to buy tickets for the Olympic Games in London will have to pay by Visa card because the Dutch ticket allocation is only for Dutch nationals, the Volkskrant reports on Wednesday. The Dutch selling agent is only allowed to sell cards to Dutch nationals, and will charge them a 23.8% booking fee on top of the price of a ticket.
All ‘third party nationals’, a fancy term for non European, are obliged to buy tickets from the agents of their country.
(Link dutchnews.nl)
Tags: Olympic Games, Olympics
January 22, 2011
Say you’ve been a FIFA footballer of the year twice and have made a name for yourself as a dedicated anti-racism activist, so much so that president Nelson Mandela himself awarded you South Africa’s Order of Good Hope, and Bono and Mother Teresa have started looking nervously over their shoulders—which is an impressive thing to make Mother Teresa do, since she’s been dead for a good while. What, then, would be your next move?
Ruud Gullit answered that question by becoming a lackey for one of the worst dictators on the planet, Howlin’ Mad Ramzan, or as the man prefers that people address him, ‘King Ramzan’. De Pers report that earlier this month Gullit signed a year and a half contract to become head coach of FC Terek Grozny, the personal football club of Moscow’s puppet ruler of unruly Chechenya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Kadyrov is not one to take criticism lightly. He is the son of former Chechen dictator Akhmad Kadyrov and has a reputation for violence. “The word opposition is unimaginable,” he once famously said. And he doesn’t just stick to words, as he has a reputation for killing everyone who opposes him. Unfortunately for the Chechen people, everybody on the long list of people who have claimed to have evidence of Kadyrov’s misdeeds have so far met with lethal ‘accidents’.
(Photo of Ruud Gullit by Hamedog, some rights reserved.)
Tags: dictators, FIFA, politics, Ruud Gullit
January 21, 2011
I have snowboarder friends in the French Alps at the moment, and I hope you’re not these two people.
Two Dutch snowboarders got stuck boarding the wrong way in the French Alps and ended up on a glacier. Oops. They had forgotten their mobile phones (extremely handy when skiing I found out) and stamped out SOS in big letters with their feet. Someone on the slopes saw them and they were rescued.
Don’t forget your mobile and make sure it’s charged. And bring a candy bar just in case.
(Link: rtl.nl, Photo of my last skiing trip in Tirol, Austria)
Tags: skiing, snowboarding
January 11, 2011
“Roller derby, what’s that?” my Dutch doctor asks while looking at my swollen knee. I hurt my knee falling on the ice a month ago, but I wanted to make sure she knew I was planning to come back with more sports-related injuries and didn’t want to re-explain why and how.
In its modern form, roller derby was revived in the United States about 10 years ago and is an all-female contact sport played on roller skates (men are referees). Two teams skate around a flat track (not a banked track like in the film Whip It, although it’s an option) and score points by passing the opposing team and physically bashing them off the track using their torsoes.
When I joined last December, there were five Dutch teams, the first one being the Amsterdam Derby Dames, founded in 2009. Just two months down the road, another two teams have popped up in Arnhem and Groningen, both within a few weeks of each other. Roller derby is catching on like wildfire. All the teams are still recruiting, learning the moves and many members need to pass an internationally recognised exam to be able to compete. It’s a ground up, build your own team thing, with no real outside help — it’s real teamwork, not that crap your boss feeds you. Members pays fees and help each other out with gear, training and transport.
The Rotterdam Deathrow Honeys were featured last December in De Telegraaf and on the radio, and train with more advanced teams such as the Ghent Go-Go Rollergirls in Belgium.
Yes, we wear fishnets and skirts, yes, you can come and watch one of these days, and yes, it’s a real contact sport. To give you an idea of how it is live, watch our favourite video of Beyonslay (derby names are puns), a ‘blocker’ of the Gotham City Roller Girls give it to Rice Rocket, ‘jammer’ for the Texas Rollergirls, the US state where the revival began.
Nope, not the first block, the second one!
(Disclaimer: Orangemaster is a of the Amsterdam Derby Dames, ) Photo of Roller derby in Hobart, Tasmania by Christopher Neugebauer, some rights reserved.
Tags: Amsterdam Derby Dames, roller derby, Rotterdam Deathrow Honeys
