This is kind of the equivalent of the Superbowl for the Dutch, but due to global warming it hasn't been held in 24 years. The previous longest interval was 22 years, so some people are starting to doubt whether it will ever happen again.
Imagine if the real Superbowl wasn't held in 24 years due to global warming and may never happen again, perhaps then it would be more of a priority.
I get your comparison to Superbowl to highlight the popularity to people abroad. A sibling mentions the football world championship.
But other than popularity there's big differences. Both Superbowl and world cup are highly organized, highly commercial events, planned way in advance, where top athletes perform.
The Elfstedentocht always comes unexpectedly. When there is a cold snap in the weather, a fever starts brewing among the population. As ice grows thicker people from all walks of life start to get involved to organize the event. Pumping stations stop their operation to improve ice conditions, crossings are created on patches of bad ice where one walks with skates over land (called 'kluunen'), and all across the track people start to sell hot chocolate and soup. The event is a huge social happening, not just for the top athletes. The people that come last over the finish line or the ones that just did not make it within the set timeframes are as much heroes as the winner of the tour.
Elfstedentocht is very much an event by the people, not an entertainment provided for the people.
> As ice grows thicker people from all walks of life start to get involved to organize the event.
This is not completely accurate. Sure, koek-en-zopie stuff might be organized by local restaurants or whatever, but the Elfstedentocht itself is prepared (almost) completely every single year. There is a whole foundation with internal hierarchy that oversees the process. The whole parcourse can be constructed on a 48 hour notice. The waterschappen don't stop their pumps out of hospitality or something, it is all pretty well organized.
I don't actually know, but waterschappen are elected bodies (in elections that are completely separate from those for local and national government, and in which all residents, including foreigners, can vote).
Presumably making the effort to allow skating is a vote winner. Even in places outside Friesland, when it looks like skating will be possible various authorities take steps to encourage ice formation by closing sluice gates and stopping boat traffic.
It's actually pretty well organised, since it's a big event, lots of things need to come together to be able to organise it in 48hrs time. Also the Dutch government has classified it as a so-called 'GRIP-1' type event, which means that all kinds of things have to be coordinated with the local & national government.
There is a great documentary (in Dutch) that shows what the foundation behind the Elfstedentocht has to go through every year to make sure they're ready in case the conditions are right to organise the race, not sure if it's available outside of NL:
Sounds like Vasaloppet, but rarer. It does have an organizer though, but still huge amounts of volunteers along and it's definitely an achievement just to complete it.
> Imagine if the real Superbowl wasn't held in 24 years due to global warming and may never happen again, perhaps then it would be more of a priority.
Given how much of a priority climate change has been in the Netherlands... I don't think so. Though I guess part of it is because it wasn't a guaranteed every-year event in the first place, so it's not that much of a change.
> Given how much of a priority climate change has been in the Netherlands...
This is an important point for those who don't live in The Netherlands. NL has done an amazing job of marketing how 'green' they are, but has been really terrible at addressing climate change or even hitting their own climate targets.
Indeed. The Dutch are good with water, but not with climate. May be due to lobbying power of Shell, NAM (natural gas) and Rotterdam harbour, Schiphol airport, Tata Steel, etc. on subsequent economic liberal governments, and also 'Polder model' [0] slowing / watering things down.
I think it’s partly the effect of being an outlier in terms of population density (makes it harder to build wind or solar farms), natural resources (few possibilities for hydro-electricity, for example), and quality of farmland (moving production to poorer grounds often isn’t a net win, globally)
There also may be an effect that making Dutch agriculture greener makes it more competitive, increasing output and thus offsetting improvements in efficiency.
But yes, such a rich country that isn’t really dependent on its agricultural output should be able to do more. Stopping fertilizer imports probably would help a lot.
> population density (makes it harder to build wind or solar farms)
This is more an excuse than an actual reason. Because the Dutch have large patches of shallow sea: which is ideal for building huge scale windparks that are, relatively cheap. The "ground" can still be used for fishing, so you hardly loose anything. Yet even building parks in sea is met with strong opposition. From wildlife preservation orgs to people complaining that this will ruin their view over the sea.
Furthermore, the IJsselmeer and Markmermeer have often been suggested as "energy storage" where water is pumped up a few meters by wind, or overcapacity electro. The Netherlands, has, in fact, build some of the largest dams in the world, but "forgot" to use them as power stations. Anyone who has ever visited Neeltje-Jans, for example, will see the opportunity to harvest some of the enormous amounts of water being pushed through the Netherlands. I live on the riverside of the Waal (part of the Rhine), where currently over 7000m³/second of (in winter warm-ish and in summer cold-ish) water passes by my office-window. There must be ways to harvest some of this energy.
There is a lack of will and a lack of urgency. Not a lack of opportunities.
You need height to get ‘serious’ hydro power. In the Netherlands, the Rhine water drops by less than 20 meters across the entire country (ballpark 100km), so I think a 1 m drop already would be optimistic.
So let’s take that 7000m³ and drop it by a meter. That’s dropping 7 million kg of water by one meter, or (if my math is right) about 70 MW of potential energy. You might get somewhat more out by decreasing the speed at which the water flows, but I doubt that would be much (the more you slow the water down, the larger the river downstream has to be)
Also, that’s if you dam the entire river. The Waal is a major river for shipping, so you can’t do that.
Finally, I think 7000m³/s is an outlier. Google gives me 1500m³/s flow rate for the Waal (and, consistent with that, 2000m³/s for the Rhine). So, on average, a system damming of the whole river, requiring all ships to go through locks, would produce about 15MW.
And I think my math is at least in the right ballpark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_generating_station generates “up to 1,903 MW of electrical power”, but it has a water drop of 24 meters, and runs in a river that has an average discharge about equal to that peak of that of the Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence_River: “The average discharge at the river's source, the outflow of Lake Ontario, is 7,410 m³/s”), and, I would guess, is designed for somewhere around that average discharge, dropping surplus water over an overflow system. So, that would account for a factor of 24 (times the height) × 5 (flow rate)
I deliberately did not talk about damming the river. Doing that would cause a lot of problems for shipping. And my house would flood for sure.
The math is simpler though: potential energy is massXheight. So any one of those can be high. Small hydropower (I built this in Switzerland for fun) using a long pipe and a reversed pump can deliver significant power from a tiny brook, if the height is enough.
If you increase the height of the entire IJsselmeer with 10cm, that is an enormous mass, a gigantic potential energy.
Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue.
The temp diff is another potential energy. As is the kinetic energy (the water is going really fast!).
We can spend hours debating why things cannot be done, but that has never brought innovation.
IJsselmeer would be storage, not extracting power.
Also, building stuff “for fun” is different from doing things at scale and come out ahead. As you say “Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue”, but, in this context, IMO of utmost importance.
I don’t think there are easy gains at scale to be had there.
> This is kind of the equivalent of the Superbowl for the Dutch
Uh, I'm not too familiar with the Superbowl, but the title of 'most popular televised sporting event in the Netherlands' definitely goes to the football world championship.
> the title of 'most popular televised sporting event in the Netherlands' definitely goes to the football world championship
Source? The last Elfstedentocht in 1997 had 9.2 million people watching it [1], while the semi-final of the Dutch national team in the world cup in 2014 had 9.1 million people watching it [2], and population had grown by ~1.5 million people in between.
I tried looking for a source but couldn't find it: I read years ago that a survey with the question "Would you rather have an elfstedentocht or win the World Cup" was answered predominantly with the former. I've used that as an example of how important this event is for the Dutch when explaining it to my foreign friends. I'll keep looking for a source, but no doubt the elfstedentocht is one of the most important events in Dutch culture regardless.
That is very surprising to me. I wonder if that would still hold today, where everyone under 24 and a good deal of people a couple years older than that have never consciously experienced an Elfstedentocht. I mean, it'd be nice, but... Winning the World Cup, as arguably the foremost nation that has never done so before, we'd certainly go crazy.
Sorry if it seems I'm digging in my heels on the "equivalent" part, I should've worded that differently. If you were trying to find an equivalent Dutch sporting event to the Superbowl it would be the Eredivisie.
But the point of the analogy was not to make a perfect equivalence to the Elfstedentocht, that would be impossible. The point was to convey to an American audience some semblance of the national importance of this particular sporting event.
It's not the equivalent of the superbowl for the Dutch. It was never a yearly competition to begin with. It was always a very rare and unpredictable event- the 4th edition took place 12 years after the third, and the gap had nothing to do with climate change: it was 1929.
So glad that as a small brnt I first used an alarm to get up and watch the 1997 edition in full. You're right, I've the feeling that my first is going to be my last as well.
Superbowl doesn't do it justice, it's much more than that.
> Imagine if the real Superbowl wasn't held in 24 years due to global warming and may never happen again, perhaps then it would be more of a priority.
I don't think that is a good comparison. The Superbowl is held every year, but the Elfstedentocht has always been a rare event depending on extreme winter conditions. From the first event in 1909 until 1997 there have been 15 of them, with the longest break between 1963 and 1985.
Isn't 24 years well past the point of anyone caring? That's a whole generation of people becoming adults without ever experiencing the event. I think after 24 years without Superbowl, Americans would just consider it a historical curiosity, and holding it again wouldn't be a national priority.
While the Elfstedentocht hasn't been held in 24 years, in that period we've had quite a few winters with enough frost to hold smaller, regional tour tour skating events (which can still attract 50,000+ people over the span of a few days). At least twice we came within a few days of organizing the Elfstedentocht. It's enough to keep the spirit alive, and it makes the event itself even more mythical.
I remember the excitement and hype growing as a teenager, back in 1985 when it was about to happen again. Epic stories about 1963, predictions about favorites who spent hours in freezers to prepare, talk about how the winner would become immortal (Evert van Bentem, still remember his name, he won again 2 years later.) It was obviously broadcast live on local TV too.
It only makes the event more mythological. Also, it's easy for non-Dutch to underestimate how big of a deal speedskating is to the Dutch (and how big of a deal the Dutch are in speedskating). EDIT: I'll attempt to give an impression.
The medal count at the 2018 Winter Olympics might be a good starting point, look at how the Dutch dominated that event[0]. Keep in mind that we're a really tiny nation, so that suggests a disproportionate amount of Olympic-level speedskaters per capita. Which only makes sense if it's a really big sport here.
Another example: I assume that when you ask the average American who Shani Davis is you'll get a blank stare, despite his great achievements[1]. Ask the average Dutch person and they'll know, and might even tell you about "that cute fridge-scene with the Erben Wennemars picture"[2][3].
Now let's compare other nations where speedskating is still a thing. Nao Kodara might be a bit more famous in Japan than Davis is in the US, but check out her Twitter bio and you'll see a photo of the Elfstedentocht monument[4][5][6]. To professional speedskaters all over the world, the Dutch are an example (the fact that we often love them more than most people in their own country probably doesn't hurt either).
So yeah, speedskating is deeply embedded in the Dutch national identity, arguably even more than soccer because it feels like our sport.
You do make me wonder if narratives around national identity work a little differently on smaller scales though (remember that the Netherlands is a small nation of about 17.5 million people). Maybe the US is too big for a thing like this.
I think you yourself don't realise that not everyone in the Netherlands cares about speed skating and the Elfstedentocht.
I'm Dutch. Early twenties. I go roller blading in the summer, and I speed skate in the winter if weather permits.
But the Elfstedentocht? It has never taken place during my life. My friends and I don't care about the Elfstedentocht at all because we've simply never experienced it. We don't get the "Elfstedentochtkoorts" whenever the mercury drops below 0. Not at all.
> deeply embedded in the Dutch national identity, arguably even more than soccer
I bet the average young person from Rotterdam cares a whole lot more about Feyenoord and the Dutch football team than they care about some 200km speed skating contest that very rarely takes place in a province in the north.
You make a good point, and I think I could have phrased that more clearly. I meant that it arguably is more Dutch than soccer is, because soccer is big in every country that isn't the US.
But you're right that I didn't take age into account. I'm in my late thirties, I remember skating on natural ice almost every winter during my childhood. I don't know if you had the same experience.
Speak for yourself, I played korfball for twelve years ;). Jokes aside, korfball isn't an olympic sport, and it didn't have Ard & Keessie to popularize it either.
Imagine if the real Superbowl wasn't held in 24 years due to global warming and may never happen again, perhaps then it would be more of a priority.