The Luxury Sports School Saints & Stars launches Dyson-Föhns, Blue Smoothies and BN’er ambassadors such as Marieke Elsinga, but behind the Golden Dumbbells is a pitch-black reality.
Saints & Stars has been positioning as the Holy Fitness Grale for the vain Instagram elite for years: sports with light show, smoothies of 7 euros and mirrors full of motivation quotes. Fitfluencers, models and presenters displace each other for a place on the treadmill with smoke machine. But if you look behind the façade, you are completely shocked.
Humane
Het Parool reveals in one shifting longread How Filipino and Indonesian cleaners worked in this self -proclaimed Premium Gym under degrading conditions. Passports were taken, working days of 5 pm were no exception, and beds were shared with strangers as if they were hostel beds in Bangkok.
Some slept on the ground in the walk-in closet of a villa of owner Tom Moos, son of Basic-Fit billionaire René Moos. Without a work visa, without a break, with a threat of wage posting or dismissal if the toilet is not enough. All in all: nice sports for all influencers, as long as you close your eyes for all the mob in the workplace.
For years free
Isn’t Marieke Elsinga ashamed that she has advertised this for years? Luuk Ikink in last night RTL Boulevard Summernight: “Did you ever notice that people went wrong?”
Marieke denies: “No, I have never seen anything of it. (…) What I have read is of course just terrible. If this is right, hey, and the research of Het Parool sounds very thorough, then it is just disgusting circumstances. I enjoyed doing it with great pleasure in the time I lived in Amsterdam, actually when the gym was still quite small.”
15 million euros
Rob Goossens fears the worst for that tent. “They have just opened a new location in which they have invested 15 million euros. I took the annual accounts. They earned 450 thousand euros last year, so then you have to make a profit for thirty years before you have it. Then it turns out that they had no money for other things.”
Are they going to earn that back? Rob: “It was literally seeing and being seen and now, if you are going to exercise there, you should actually hope that no one is looking and that a back door is open, because you would rather not be associated with this.”
TV-confessional
Rob then teases Marieke. “By the way, I like that we have both confessed a bit now at the desk,” he says, pointing to the riot about his chatgpt affair.
Marieke immediately does a little indignant. “There is not much to confess to me. I have sports at a gym where things have happened that cannot.”
Free sports
Now Marieke distances himself from that gym. “I think it is important to speak out about it, because I have always been on their website as an ambassador, because I also showed on social media that I was exercising there.”
She concludes: “So I exercised there for free, we did that for each other, then I also think it is important that I pronounce that if this happened, that I find that somewhat. I think it is very logical that we are talking about this.”