Ilse van Hooijdonk only has one leg. Due to a tumor, she had the other one amputated so that she could continue to live cancer-free. “I could never have imagined that you could climb such a mountain using manual strength.”
Bart Boogaard can walk, but the incomplete spinal cord injury caused by a tumor in the spine means that his brain cannot properly process the signals to his legs. “As an athlete, it was tough to learn to walk again like a baby.”
The two Haarlemmers will train on the Kopje van Bloemendaal, a top in the dunes where there is a gradient of 12 percent on a small part of the route.
‘Just Cop Maastricht’
But just before a training session in March last year, they suffered a serious blow. The expensive handbikes are brazenly stolen from the sidewalk, while Ilse and Bart are getting ready for the workout. “I thought the neighbors had played a joke,” Ilse remembers well. “I hopped to their gardens on my crutches. But they were really gone!”
Bart’s wife comes up with a bright idea, which leads to a real episode of ‘Flikken Maastricht’, as Bart outlines in the NH report.
Watch the report about the two hand bikers below: