Skating

As we have a mild winter this year without snow or ice, I delved in the archives to see some old times when we had cold winters. This must be in 1956 in Amsterdam on the canal along our home and it is me in the middle with my sister and brother photographed by my father. We are all skating on the wooden skates with an iron that was tied under your shoe with bandages which were called "friese doorlopers". Only my sister had some old skates with shoes which had belonged to my mother. When I look at the clothes of everybody I feel I lived in another century. We all had just one winter coat and no sportswear, we didn't even know what that was. The dutch have always been skaters and when there is ice everybody has to go out on the ice.

So we were over the moon yesterday with a gold, silver and bronze medal at the Olympics for speedskating.

And another GOLD medal today for the lady Ireen Wust!

Epke

I am not such a sporty figure but I like to watch the Olympics in London on tv. You see all kind of sports you have never seen before and with the downpours we have here it is a great diversion. But yesterday it was a special day for us, our national nice guy, the gymnastic Epke Zonderland was going to perform his exercise at the horizontal bar. To win gold he had to do something special and he did!

What he did was magical, he flew like a bird in the air three times in a row, which nobody had ever done before. The audience in the stadium exploded.

I made this poor photo from tv but have a look at the video here for a better view of his exercise and listen to the exciting comment of the reporter and the sounds of the audience.

http://nos.nl/os2012/video/404026-os-2012-gouden-oefening-epke.html