Dutch speed skaters On Russian ice

The Economist, by M.S., Haarlem, Feb 10, 2014

SATURDAY afternoon presented a typical scene at the local skating rink in Haarlem: a synchronised peloton of long-limbed Dutch Mercuries, aged 15 to 70, whipping around the inner lane of the regulation 400-metre (1,312 feet) circuit, while a couple hundred of us clumsy mortals straggled along the periphery. Five centuries after Pieter Bruegel painted his scenes of cavorting Dutch peasants with blades tied to their shoes, Holland remains a country where speed-skating rivals football as a national sport. At 2:30 pm, a clump of skaters began congregating beneath a jumbo video display, and gradually everyone on the rink stopped to watch. Across the continent in Sochi, Sven Kramer, the reigning king of Dutch skating and currently ranked the second-fastest all-around skater of all time, was about to skate the 5,000 metres.

It wasn’t much of a contest: Mr Kramer set an Olympic record of 6:10.76. The skaters race two by two, and Mr Kramer blew away his American opponent, Jonathan Kuck, who strained so hard to keep up that he stumbled over his own skate. The closest competition came from Mr Kramer’s fellow countrymen, Jan Blokhuisen and Jorrit Bergsma, who finished five and six seconds slower but took silver and bronze nonetheless. At the end of the race the crowd at the Haarlem rink was treated to a rare sight: an Olympic dais monopolised by three orange-clad Dutchmen. In America the spectacle would have prompted group chants of “USA!”, but the Dutch are more subdued about such things, and the Haarlemmers confined themselves to a round of applause before going back to skating, their strides a bit longer and traces of self-satisfied grins on their faces.

The Dutch love affair with skating was born of long canals and short freezing seasons—short enough, at least, that a thick layer of ice feels like an excuse for a holiday, rather than a reminder of winter misery. Ice races were a deep-rooted tradition by the early 19th century, especially in the northern province of Friesland, where the fields and canals are longest, and the local farmers see taciturn stubbornness as a virtue. Every year when the ice is thick enough, hundreds of thousands of Dutch take to the ice from town to town, on official canal skating courses around the country. The greatest of them is the Elfstedentocht, first organized in 1909, which runs nearly 200 kilometres (123 miles), takes at least seven hours, and ends with the skaters bleeding, exhausted, and covered with ice.

This year the canals did not freeze, and the victories in Sochi have offered some relief for skating-starved Dutch. But the relief is as much about politics as sports. Russia and the Netherlands had designated 2013-14 as a Friendship Year, with cultural exchanges and mutual visits by the countries’ leaders. It turned into a diplomatic disaster, with high-profile contacts only drawing Dutch public attention to Russia’s troubling human-rights record. First, in December 2012, a Russian dissident committed suicide in a Dutch detention centre rather than be returned to his own country. When Vladimir Putin visited Amsterdam last April he was picketed by Dutch gay-rights protesters, no surprise in a country that was the first in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. In October police in The Hague briefly arrested Russia’s deputy ambassador on suspicion of child abuse, forcing the Dutch foreign minister to apologise for violating his diplomatic immunity. Two weeks later the Netherlands’ deputy ambassador to Moscow was attacked in his home by unknown assailants who scrawled a homophobic slur on a mirror; the deputy ambassador is gay, and the attack was widely interpreted as retaliation for the arrest in The Hague.

Meanwhile Russia seized a Dutch-registered ship belonging to the activist group Greenpeace and imprisoned its crew, including two Dutch citizens, after they tried to block a Russian oil exploration ship in the Arctic. The Netherlands sued Russia in an international maritime court, and ultimately Russia dropped the charges and released the Dutch activists. Shortly afterwards, while most democratic countries’ leaders were resolving to skip the games in Sochi over human-rights concerns, the Dutch announced that both the prime minister Mark Rutte and the country’s royal couple, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, would attend. Mr Rutte denied any quid pro quo for the release of the Greenpeace activists, but the Dutch public had its suspicions. All this lent a sour taste to the debut of the games. Each time Dutch television showed the king and queen smiling in the stands in Sochi, one had a nagging feeling that they were there to atone for all the diplomatic unpleasantness and to safeguard Dutch commercial interests.

For the Dutch public, the speed-skating victories seemed to dissolve the tension. Suddenly Sochi was no longer the site of a humiliating diplomatic defeat, but of a thrilling sports victory. The shift was complete Sunday night, after Ireen Wüst easily won the women’s 3,000 metres. Local television made sure to catch a post-race shot of Ms Wüst hopping on her bike, like any average Dutchwoman, for the ride from the stadium to Heineken House, where the Dutch delegation congregates. She arrived there just in time to catch a visit from Mr Putin, who strode in clad in a Russian-red tracksuit and a Dutch-orange parka, surrounded by bodyguards, to congratulate the skaters on their triumph. “I even got a hug from him,” Ms Wüst gushed afterwards. The Russians have been experts at translating iconography and public ceremony into power since the days of the tsars, and Mr Putin is a past master.

Back in Haarlem, across town from the ice rink at the venerable Teylers Museum, one of the last of the Dutch-Russian cultural exchanges of the year had just opened. An exhibit of 19th-century romantic paintings included works from a private Dutch collection and from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Among the Russian works, one of the more striking depicts a Moscow outdoor market in winter; the goods on offer are overwhelmingly Orthodox religious icons and busts of Tsar Alexander II. Two paintings over, a Dutch winter landscape might be a slightly updated version of Bruegel’s scenes from centuries earlier, complete with a smiling peasant traversing a frozen river on skates. In Bruegel’s works the skaters tend to look as though they are shuffling along, but by the early 1800s the Dutch had clearly got the hang of it. The peasant is leaning over the outside edge of his skate, using his weight to carve the turn, like Sven Kramer acing the 5,000 metres.