Whenever the first serious snowfall arrives in the Alps, it is soon followed by the Netherlands’ first “gipsvlucht” — “gips” means plaster, of the sort used in casts, while “vlucht” is flight — of the season, carrying aching, broken Dutch skiers. This year, as usual, the news teams were out in force covering the special airlift as it arrived in Rotterdam from Innsbruck, Austria, on Dec. 28. It was the first of many.
Europeans from every country love to ski, but the Dutch flatlanders have an outsize love for the slopes. With the country’s highest elevation at 1,059 feet — which isn’t even fully their own, being shared at the border with Belgium and Luxembourg — they have to travel the farthest for decent skiing.
In the seaside dunes of the town where I grew up, just north of The Hague, there was a short pine needle ski course of no discernible drop. We could make up for it only by traveling 600 miles to the Alps for a precious week of skiing during the school holidays.
And yet in the 2014 Olympics, for the first time, a Dutch person — Nicolien Sauerbreij, from the town of De Hoef, a few feet below sea level — will be defending her title as champion in a downhill event, having won gold in the parallel giant slalom snowboarding event in 2010.
Leading the way uphill is the Dutch royal family, who, as every Dutch person knows, has taken an annual ski holiday in the Austrian village of Lech since shortly after World War II. By common agreement, except for one photo session at the beginning of the vacation week, the paparazzi leave them alone. (In 2012, the holiday ended in tragedy, when the king’s brother, Prince Johan Friso, was buried in an avalanche, putting him in a coma from which he never emerged; he died of complications in August.)
Still, nothing stops Dutch people from skiing. In 2012, while the country was still struggling through recession, nearly one million (out of a population of almost 17 million) traveled to the Alps. They descend en masse on Alpine resorts, most of them Austrian; some fly or travel by train, but most drive. The beginning of the February week that the Dutch schools are off is known for some of the longest traffic jams in Europe.
Even worse, in the opinion of other skiers, not all of them natives, are Dutch children, the most poorly behaved among Alpine tourists, known for pranks like shouting at skiers from chairlifts, trying to startle them into falling.
Of course, globalization has made everything more accessible to everyone, including gold medals for snow sports. Improved travel, coaching and sponsorships have produced, in the 21st century, that remarkable thing, a Dutch snowboarding champion. Scandinavians and alpine countries and North Americans still dominate, but one no longer has to be born in a wintry climate to compete. In the next decades there will, undoubtedly, be a South African medalist in skiing, or a medal-winning Brazilian snowboarder.
But if the globalized world is disorienting, the Dutch had a handle on it centuries ago. Their country is tiny, with a lot of people living on unstable, often reclaimed land. Since the days of the Dutch East India Company, they have looked outward for everything they couldn’t get at home. It made them rich and, for a time, among the world’s greatest sea powers.
The Dutch pursuit of a recreation like skiing should be seen in a similar light. Mountains are massive, and yet snow can be unstable underfoot just like water.
Skiing brings the Dutch out of themselves, the mountains being familiar and yet different. More important, they are far away — which, as the Dutch have demonstrated throughout their history, is no obstacle, just an excellent challenge.
Eric Weinberger is a freelance writer.