You could call this photo of a surfer on the A2 near Den Bosch during high tide in 1995 iconic. The surfer in the photo is Max van Noorden from Den Bosch. He died a few years after the photo was taken, for his family it is a special memory of their brother. “That photo keeps coming up.”
Max is never far away in the memories of sister Elly van Noorden: “But I often think of him, especially at high tide. Then I think: what a shame that he is no longer there. But it was also incredibly beautiful. It is unique what he has done.”
Max and his brother and sisters come from a real windsurfing family. They all went to Friesland for windsurfing lessons in the late 1970s. “Max was actually still too small to surf at the time. He sat on his knees on the back of the instructor’s board,” Elly remembers.
The lessons on the back of the shelf were not in vain. Max turned out to have a talent for windsurfing. He became Dutch and European champion. That left him wanting more: he had his sights set on the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996.
“The photographer was not interested at all, he already had a photo of the mayor in a boat.”
“He practiced a lot on the Zuiderplas in Den Bosch. It suddenly became a lot bigger due to the high water, up to the A2,” says Elly. Max also realized at the time that it would produce a special image, such a surfer on the highway. So he called the newspaper photographer. “But he was not interested in it at all. He already had a photo of the mayor of Vught in a boat on the A2,” Elly laughs.
Photographer John Claessens from De Telegraaf came to take a look. “With his horn of a telephoto lens.” John was waiting on the viaduct until he could take the special snapshot. “We as a family were also there. And there came Maxje surfed,” says Elly proudly.
Max’s photo went all over the world. “From New York to Australia and Hong Kong.” The photo also has a prominent place at Elly’s home. Now, almost thirty years later, the photo has an extra special meaning. Because shortly after the highway surfing adventure, disaster struck.
“Six months later he started having pain in his back and leg. Doctors thought he had a hernia. But it turned out to be a tumor in his spine. He had surgery, but unfortunately did not survive.”
“I had difficulty with it in the first years after his death.”
Max died in 1998 at the age of 33. His Olympic dream, for which he trained on the flooded A2, never came true. But the photo is a lasting memory. Now Elly is proud of it, but that was difficult in the beginning: “The first years after his death I had difficulty with it. Then you mainly feel sad. But that will have a place. Now I am just proud of my brother .”
Max’s photo sailed for years on trips on the Binnendieze in Den Bosch, where Elly provided boat tours as skipper. “Then I came just outside the city on the boat and told the story about the flood and the photo of my brother. For people who didn’t know the story, it was wow.”
For Max’s relatives, the photo has actually become an ordinary photo over the years. “But in its ‘ordinariness’ it is at the same time very special and unique,” says Elly. “Specially because Max is no longer here. This way he lives on.”
Max even made it to the Staatsloterij show on RTL4 in 1995 with his campaign.
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