January 28, 2009

Famous Dutch goalie breaks UK record

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:11 pm

Elftal

Manchester United goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar has set a new record in the UK Premier League: he has now gone 1,032 minutes – which amounts to more than 11 matches – without conceding a goal, beating the previous record of 1,025 minutes by Chelsea’s Petr Cech five seasons ago.

Van der Sar made Dutch news as well this week by moving up from fifth to third place in the list of best paid Dutch sportspeople. The number one spot is held by baseball player Andruw Jones, while the rest of the top ten is strictly a football affair. However, the difference between Jones’s annual income (17,000,000 euro) and the number two spot, held by Ruud van Nistelrooy (8,200,000 euro) shows you which sport brings in the real bacon.

And Van Der Sar is the guy in black on the family portrait.

(Links: radionetherlands.nl, sportweek.nl, Photo: minbuza.nl)

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January 13, 2009

Ice skates totally sold out

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 4:30 pm
Skates

It was bound to happen. People have been frantically trying to score new or second-hand skates for days, but alas, ice skates are totally sold out in the Netherlands, according to skate manufacturer Viking in Almere. On Monday Viking said it sold 75,000 pairs of skates, almost selling everything it had in stock.

The last two weeks were extremely busy days at Viking. Even on Monday, when the thaw set it, they were still selling skates. The buzz is that sometime around Thursday it is going to freeze again and we can all go out skating. I do hope so because I had a lot of fun skating on the canal. The picture above depicts my *ahem* custom-made French Canadian figure skates, which cost a bundle back when I was training at 5:30 am in the morning three times a week. Yes, I fell once already, thank you. However, if you want to buy Viking skates, you’ll have to wait until summer when they will make more.

Even finding a place to get my skates sharpened was not easy, but thanks to Twitter, I found a bike shop down the street that sharpens skates.

In the meantime, there’s always that huge Indoor skating rink they opened in Enschede.

(Link: z24.nl, Photo: Jeroen)

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Tour de France start hindered by Protestant reformists

Filed under: Religion,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:17 pm
TDF 2007

In our vigilant reporting on the ‘Jihad against fun’ sweeping the Netherlands, some heavy duty Protestant (unintentional pun intended) towns in the provinces of South Holland and Zealand where the Tour de France is planning to kick off on 4 July 2010 are saying ‘non, merci’ to the great cycling event because it kicks off on a Sunday. The SGP (Political Reformed Party) do not want townspeople to be forced to work on a Sunday because, well, it’s Sunday, and according to them, you’re not supposed to work. Some law actually gives them the right to refuse to work on Sunday, which was surely a good thing back when people worked six days a week like madmen. Lucky for us, we could save face if the organisers and the SGP can agree on a route that would not disturb the people that really want to rest on Sunday.

It’s comforting to know that a small group of people are mainly thinking of themselves and not of the greater good of the Tour starting in the Netherlands again (Den Bosch, 1996). Or maybe they really enjoy getting press and making sure the rest of the world knows that that ‘being tolerant thing’ is just a tourist trap.

Before anyone says, “yes, but they have a right to rest by law…”, let me provide a concrete solution to the problem. If you can’t (won’t) do work on the Sabbath, you get/hire/ask someone to do it for you. It doesn’t stop the Jews I know, it shouldn’t stop a single Protestant, either.

(Link: depers.nl, Photo: Orangemaster at the finish line in Paris, 2007)

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January 11, 2009

Thaw to set in

Filed under: General,Sports by Branko Collin @ 2:29 pm

No Elfstedentocht for now. National weather institute KNMI predicts that Monday a period of thaw will set in, with wind coming from the South and from the South West. That also means that the country will not have had an official cold wave, which in the Netherlands is defined as at least five consecutive days of frost of which three dip below -10 degrees.

Somebody who won’t be skating for a while anyway is Eimer van Middelkoop: the defense minister broke his wrist during a 30 kilometer skating tour between Bleiswijk and Zevenhuizen, according to Nu.nl (Dutch).

Skating madness held the country in its grip the past weeks, but with the temperature dipping the lowest in the South, the madness spilled over to Belgium. The spokesperson for Vereniging De Friesche Elf Steden, the organizer of the Elfstedentocht, told BN/De Stem (Dutch) that most foreign journalistic attention stems from our Southern neighbours. One fanatic Belgian skater and past participant in the Elfstedentocht, Henri Jaecques, argues in Het Nieuwsblad (Dutch) that Flanders should have its own mythical skate race. “From Sluis to Ieper, 200 kilometer, and perfectly skateable.” The first part of that trajectory, a 16 kilometer strip from Sluis to Brugge, was declared officially open to skaters this weekend, according to De Telegraaf (Dutch).

Photo top: a chair in IJburg, Amsterdam awaiting the next novice skater or an ever grimmer fate.

Photo bottom: a frozen Noorderamsterkanaal.

Link: Weer.nl (Dutch).

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January 7, 2009

Winter fever Dutch style and time off

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 3:10 pm
elf-1.jpg

Winter seems to be here to stay this year in the Netherlands, which means that canals and ponds stay frozen with or without the presence of snow, birds need to be fed bread so I keep hearing from bird lovers, and the country has skating fever. A business colleague proudly told everyone on a mailing list that she had tailored her work schedule around skating until it lasts. It’s safe to assume that employees are calling in sick as well and are on some frozen pond somewhere getting it out of their system.

As for myself, I just drove through Amstelveen and Oude Kerk aan de Amstel and saw tons of kids skating, like some modern Dutch winter postcard and spotted a place to sharpen my figure skates, should I join the party this weekend.

Tomorrow, the entire Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs gets a half day off to go skating. I asked the approachable and twittering Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen on Twitter if he plans on going skating, but he keeps telling us about meetings in Paleis Noordeinde where the Queen works.

The not so nice side to this story is that school children in the South of the country where the temperatures are lower and the ice is safer cannot just take time off to go skating because then the schools cannot meet their obligatory 1,040 hours of teaching lessons. What about the kids in the North of the country I just saw?

However, if the Elfstedentocht (The Eleven-cities Tour) is a reality this year, then they will be given time off to go and watch. It only happens every ten year or so and if not, they’ll all call in sick too I bet.

And then half the country will be unavailable, out of the office, sick, and just plain busy.

Last year we talked about a man who brought a piece of his toe to his Elfstedentocht reunion.

(Link: elsevier.nl, Photo: tvglorie)

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December 23, 2008

Amstelveen volleyball club breaks world record

Filed under: Dutch first,Sports by Orangemaster @ 10:59 am
volleyball

The players of the SVU Volleyball Club in Amstelveen, a student club part of the VU University Amsterdam, broke the world record for volleyball by playing 60 hours in a row. They broke the old record of 55 hours and 3 minutes, landing them a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The last bit was apparently very tough. “It was barely volleyball. They could barely move anymore,” a spokesperson for the team said. The team started on Saturday 20 December at 8 am with 24 players. Two people had to leave the field: one player was exhausted, while the other one had a knee injury. The players could not be replaced.

(Link: rtl.nl)

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September 30, 2008

Second biggest skating rink opens in Enschede

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 8:26 am
Rink

The city of Enschede, known for Grolsch beer and a very unfortunate fireworks explosion a few years back, should soon be better known for a brand new skating rink, built mainly for short and long track skating. When a North American says ‘skating rink’, hockey and figure skating usually come to mind first, so I had to be explicit, although the rink’s website does mention hockey and activities for young and old.

Scheduled to open on 1 October, The Twente IJsbaan is a fully covered, 400-metre-round rink and the second biggest in the country after Thialf in Heerenveen. It has 66 km (!) of pipes under it, as it uses liquid CO2 for cooling. Read more about this feat of engineering (in Dutch).

From 2 October to 5 October, the entrance fee will be a mere EUR 2,50 instead of EUR 5 and the rink will be opened from noon to 8 pm. I’ve never been to Enschede, maybe it’s time to finally visit.

(Link: ijsbaan-twente.com)

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August 25, 2008

Warm welcome for Olympic athletes in 1928 stadium

Filed under: Shows,Sports by Branko Collin @ 7:00 pm

The Olympic athletes arrived home today, and they were given a warm welcome at the 1928 Olympic stadium in Amsterdam. I live right around the corner, and decided to take my crummy old digital camera there. As luck would have it, the organizers had decided that the athletes would enter through the front gate, where there is ample opportunity for non-accredited press (i.e. l’il ole me) to climb onto flowerbeds and the pedestals of pompous statues.

Below you see Anky van Grunsven (gold, dressage) being interviewed by famous sports presenter Tom Egberts. It was very hard to get a photo of her not grinning like a maniac, but here she had to be serious for a moment. She was one of the first there, and being a gold medal winner had to wait until the end to enter the stadium, and she was all smiles all the time.

More below the fold…

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August 12, 2008

Cannonball champ 2008 with eight metre splash

Filed under: Shows,Sports by Branko Collin @ 8:27 am

The national cannonball (“bommetje”) champion of this year is Freddy van der Pol who also won last year, according to De Pers (Dutch, video here). His splash at Zwembad Noord in Stadskanaal reached a height of 8.60 metres, not nearly enough to break the record of 12.4 metres. The status of the title is itself heavily contested as there is a competing championship that broke away from Zwembad Noord’s in 2001, organised by Sportfondsen. Their championship will be held September 5, and still has some wild cards to give away.

Matching summer hit on the grey web: Als het golft by De Dijk.

Photo by Sandra Forbes, some rights reserved.

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July 24, 2008

DNA test posthumously inflicted on athlete

Filed under: History,Sports by Branko Collin @ 11:00 am

Foekje Dillema, the runner banned for life after undergoing a humiliating and undisclosed gender test in 1950, underwent another test posthumously this year. Commissioned by Dutch TV programme Andere Tijden Sport, and with permission of the athlete’s family, researchers of the Erasmus Medisch Centrum in Rotterdam found out that Dillema was a woman with a form of chromosomal mosaicism, which caused her to have two X chromosomes for every Y (possible in XX and XY configurations, though the show doesn’t tell). According to the researcher that was an extremely rare condition. The programme’s presenter claimed that nowadays Dillema would be able to compete without problems in women’s track and field events.

Reporter Max Dohle who is writing a biography on Dillema withdrew his cooperation for the Andere Tijden show after he found out about the DNA test: “The last thing you should do to Foekje is subject her again to a sex test. She would have never wanted that.” After the first test in 1950, Dillema felt extremely humiliated and she withdrew for always from public life.

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