Groningen sport was celebrated on Monday evening with a beautiful Sports Gala in MartiniPlaza. Rower Marloes Oldenburg succeeded Melvin Twellaar (also a rower) as Athlete of the Year. The Sports Team of the Year award also went to rowers. How could it be otherwise in a province with a large student city as its capital?
The theme of the Sports Gala this year was motivation – on Monday afternoon, psychology professor Nico W. van Yperen and acclaimed short track coach Jeroen Otter spoke about it in a symposium that was part of the gala. Well, the Groningen sports world could use some motivation. With the relegation of FC Groningen and the bankruptcy of Donar, it is difficult to call it a good year for Groningen sport. Groninger Bauke Mollema, who has left Groningen, also did not have a fantastic year on the bike. But never write off Mollema, and the FC and Donar are also slowly but surely crawling out of their misery.
Athlete of the Year
Of course they were not nominated. In the Athlete of the Year category, this applied to two athletes who had already been nominated last year. Rower Melvin Twellaar ‘beat’ – in such a sports election you can’t really speak of that as in a sports competition – then high jumper Britt Weerman. This year she set the bar high for Twellaar to beat her again, because the only 20-year-old born in Assense jumped a Dutch record in 2023 with 1 meter 96 and took silver at the European Indoor Championships in Istanbul.
Moreover, Twellaar still had to deal with another rower: Marloes Oldenburg. In her ‘old age’ (she is 35) she won gold with the four without at the World Cup. Twellaar also succeeded, but in double sculls. In advance you would say that the prize would go to one of the rowing nominees. And so it was: a mix of former Groningen top athletes, representatives of the Groningen press and the public chose Marloes Oldenburg.
She doesn’t just get the prize because she rowed so hard at the World Cup. It is also her impressive story. She told Thijs de Jong, the presenter of the evening together with Dione de Graaff, how she broke her cervical vertebra during a mountain bike outing on holiday, just over a year ago. A tough rehabilitation followed. “I couldn’t walk at first and had to learn to swim again before I could row,” the Gyas rower explained.
Sports Team of the Year
In the election for Sports Team of the Year, the third Groningen team sports giant, the men’s volleyball team of Samen Lycurgus, was nominated for its cup win, but once again it was rowers who walked away with the prize.
It is a very special sports team, because it is a mixed team of Gyas and Aegir (supplemented by another rower). Normally – in a playful way – they are sworn enemies, but when it comes to top sport, they are in the same boat. Jelle Bakker, Erik Talens and Lucas Keijzer won silver in that boat at the Under-23 World Championships. That second place was enough to become Sports Team of the Year, because the ladies of Groningen Athletics (Dutch champions) were behind the net.
Talent and adapted athlete of the year
Athletes nominated twice, but no prizes. In the Talent of the Year category it was ‘three times a charm’ for athletics. Heptathlete Sofie Dokter (20) won silver at the European Under-23 Championships, also finished eleventh at the Outdoor World Championships for tall women and can now also call herself Sports Talent of the Year.
After all, it was not without reason that the evening started with an audience-participating haka led by a Rotterdam student rugby player who traveled with a Maori family for two years – MartiniPlaza was shaken to its foundations in a way that a dance party cannot do. It was written in the stars that roller-coaster rugby player Jop van der Laan would win the award for best adapted athlete. He also came back from a serious injury and was struggling mentally.
With this, winners Jop van der Laan and Marloes Oldenburg symbolize the theme of the evening like no other: if their stories don’t motivate us, we don’t know what will.