People skate on the frozen Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam in 2012, which was the last time the city’s canals froze over. Photograph: Margriet Faber/AP Sadly, the canals in Amsterdam haven’t frozen over since 2012. And they haven’t been able to race the famous Elfstedentocht, the marathon skating race around Friesland, since 1997, because they haven’t had a winter cold enough since. It’s true that the Dutch do have a tradition of skating that, as the sports historian Marnix Koolhaas has written, it can be traced back to the Reformation, that the first skating world championships were held in Amsterdam in 1889, even that their first gold medallist, Carry Geijssen in 1968, said she sometimes skated to work along the frozen canals.
But the reasons for their success tend to be a little less Mapes Dodge than Couric made them sound. Until the mid-1990s the Dutch ran a centralised skating programme called the Kernploeg, which allowed six skaters to train full time. Then two of their star athletes broke away to set up their own commercial skating teams. And these days the Dutch system is entirely decentralised. They have eight professional skating teams who raise their own funds and run their own talent ID programmes, and support around 80 full-time athletes. Over half of those 111 medals have been won since this switch.
There are 20 long-track ice-rinks in the Netherlands, while there are only six of those in the entire US, and the Dutch national federation has 7,000 junior members. Which isn’t so very many, since the swimming federation has 75,000, but those 7,000 are all channelled into speed skating, whereas other countries split their talent between short track, ice hockey and figure skating. Still, there is hope for everyone else. Canada’s Ted-Jan Bloemen just finished second in the men’s 5,000m. Bloemen was born and raised in Gouda and became Canadian in 2014. If you can’t beat them, best recruit them instead.