For a moment I thought I had just missed it. After all, it had just been Christmas, or perhaps my eyes were too focused on the sporting violence of the World Darts Championship. But Maarten van der Weijden, the man who fears water, had one for a good cause world record for swimming backwards. A new exceptional achievement: 17 kilometers in eight hours, a record that I cannot appreciate, especially because until this weekend I didn’t even know that a human can swim backwards. But what was more exceptional was that this was the first time that Maarten van der Weijden took on a bizarre challenge and I only read about it afterwards.
I thought back to 2018, when Van der Weijden, Olympic open water champion at the 2008 Olympic Games, tried to complete the Eleven Cities Tour by swimming. He was broadcast live by the NOS, and there was hardly any place along the Frisian water where he was not shouted forward. I still remember the final day very well, when, as a reporter on the train to Leeuwarden, I read that he had stopped his journey and I then decided to pick up the pieces in Burdaard, the village where he was fished out of the water as an empty pile of people. It was precisely his failure to complete that made him an almost mythical figure and Van der Weijden, who himself survived leukemia, raised almost five million euros for cancer research.
A year later he simply did it again, again with enough publicity. Now he completed the journey, fairly easily, and millions again went to cancer research through his foundation. 2023, once again, now an Eleven Cities Triathlon. Now millions again for charity, although media attention had already waned; If everything you do is exceptional, then ultimately nothing is natural anymore.
If everything you do is exceptional, then ultimately nothing is natural anymore.
But the contrast with this weekend was very big. A record attempt in an empty swimming pool in Zaltbommel, broadcast on a YouTube channel called ‘4 Event Facilities Waddinxveen’. A few thousand people had clicked on the stream, whether or not afterwards. In the comments there is an ally who would have liked to have heard about this attempt earlier. We had missed little. We could have watched a man slowly swim laps for hours, while presenters provided rubber ducks with the names of donors and released them into the water in another lane of the pool. “He doesn’t swim like that on his own, that’s the idea,” said one of the presenters. Art.
About ten thousand euros were raised, slightly less than the target amount. Beautiful, but a pittance for another rather bizarre sporting achievement. But also very logical, if most people only hear afterwards that you were planning this in the first place. You can hardly accuse Van der Weijden of attention seeking this time as he barely attracted any attention. If he still puts himself through the wringer because of his persistent guilt as a cancer survivor, often emphasized by him in interviews, then I would like to convince him that he deserves to live, even without sporting self-flagellation. That, if there ever was such a thing as that debt, he has long since repaid it.
But I also know he won’t listen, and he won’t stop. Not even if his record attempt of somersaulting into his neighbor’s daughter’s paddling pool only raises ten euros.
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