Next week the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina will start with a parade in San Siro, the famous stadium that will unfortunately be demolished in the not too distant future. At NOS they have already started looking ahead and traditionally they also visited Bert van der Tuuk who is up to his neck in sportswear. In an office on an industrial estate in Assen, he has been working on a two-layer suit for six years, a skating suit that, according to Van der Tuuk, would allow you to skate 8 percent faster than in the skating suit that our top skaters wore until recently. That seems revolutionary, but it must be said that Van der Tuuk comes to every Winter Games with a revolutionary suit in which you can skate faster than in previous skating suits.
His seamstresses were working on Jutta Leerdam’s suit. It will soon be so tight around her body that putting it on could be a problem. That’s how far the sport has come from us: our skaters wear suits that actually don’t allow themselves to be put on. When they asked Van der Tuuk whether it was cheating to go skating in a faster suit, he referred to Canada and Italy; skaters from those countries were also allowed to wear his latest suits.
After the mini-report in Bert van der Tuuk’s studio, I no longer felt like attending the Winter Olympics. The gigantic medal harvests of our skaters at the last Winter Games had nothing to do with talent or talent, but were the result of technical gadgets: hypersonic skating suits, but also super-fast unfolding clap skates, aerodynamic helmets and having better halls in which to skate. In any case, skating is one of the few sports for which you cannot have a talent.
We have annexed a B-sport that we can dominate because the rest of the world is not willing to put as much money, time and effort into it as we do.
It promises to be an exciting tournament for the first time in years. The American Jordan Stolz, who is monitored in Milan by an ICE team, has been the fastest over the shorter distances for several seasons and at five kilometers the Norwegian Sander Eitrem rode under six minutes for the first time. The Dutch look powerless, but with Bert van der Tuuk’s skating suits they will unexpectedly become much faster again.
In the meantime, Bert van der Tuuk is already working on a new suit for the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps. They say that he is also secretly working on a suit in which any Dutchman could, in principle, win an Olympic medal. Don’t let the medal rankings fool you: the Netherlands is not a sporting country, skating is only a sport here.
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